Nothing Like Harker
by BC
Summary: Sequel to Call Me Mina. Post DH, pre-anime. It has been two years and they have grown, and the world has become more complicated. That is when they meet again.
1. God and My Right

Disclaimer: Own neither Harry Potter nor Hellsing nor Dracula. It's all property of other people, and I'm not quite clever enough to make money from it.

Warnings: Spoilers for HP up to and including DH, mild cussing, violence

A/N: This is a sequel to _Call me Mina_. You can read it on its own, but it makes better sense if you've read the other one before starting this. The style is a bit different but, hey, it's been three years – I'm a different person now.  
I want to apologise to everybody who reviewed _Call me Mina_ and/or added it to their alert/favorite. I meant to write a sequel since about the fourth positive reaction I received, and I started a few times, too, just… it never quite made sense and the imagination faltered. Yet, do not despair, ladies and gentlemen, for here it is, the brand new, ready to be devoured, following a successful older sibling of a story, the _Nothing like Harker_!

Enjoy.

Brynn

Nothing like Harker

x

Chapter One: God And My Right

x

2nd of June 1999

x

There are things in your life you know you can't escape from.  
But you try.  
Then again, isn't trying to escape from things you know you cannot escape from one of the things that make you human?

Harry wished he were free to curse, but the walls in this place echoed with every single step leading him to what was promising to become his damnation, and he was reasonably sure that a whispered word would carry just as well. There were places you didn't curse in: churches, McGonagall's classroom, the Buckingham palace…

What in the name of Godric Gryffindor was he doing here?

"Explain this to me once more. Maybe I'll get it this time," he muttered.

Ginny, still miffed that he hadn't offered her his arm and therefore she had no one to hang onto and had to walk on her own two feet – which was proving unexpectedly difficult in the high-heeled shoes she had chosen for the occasion – huffed. Neville and Ron gave Harry commiserating glances and Luna kept on humming, staring into space. Harry was afraid she would wander off, so he had charged Neville with keeping an eye on her; the boy unfortunately took it a bit too literally and was currently going cross-eyed because of it.

Hermione pushed past her hulking giant of a boyfriend to the front of the group, paused to get a better look at a statue on their left and was rammed into by Ron, who couldn't stifle his cursing – and it did carry just like Harry thought it would.

"Control yourself, Ronald!" Hermione hissed, apparently nervous, despite looking even more radiant than she had for the Yule Ball. She was a veritable ball of jitters, and that made Harry's palm itch. He wanted to take out his wand and blast the first thing that jumped out on them… gods, how he wished they were in an evil, haunted, cursed mansion instead!

"Just suck it up, mate," Ron told him, towering over Hermione's head, perfectly ridiculous in an all-muggle tuxedo. And wasn't it unfair that Neville and Ron could wear tuxedo, while Harry had to go in a robe? "This is hopefully the last-"

"You just _had_ to jinx me!" Harry grumbled, and did as advised to: sucked it up. But nobody could make him go quietly, and he would do his best to ensure that Hermione suffered, suffered, _suffered_ for forcing him into this.

"You cannot ignore the Queen's summons!" Hermione protested in undertone, jabbing Harry's side with her wickedly sharp elbow. She looked around furtively, probably checking if anyone had heard her use the politically incorrect title of Her Royal Highness, and ducked back to the tail of the group, making Harry feel yet iffier about the entire happening.

He, personally, had never spared a thought to the royal family. He had learnt about them in school, but in the magical world they had simply not been mentioned and it never occurred to him that some kind of an idiot would think to mention Harry to them. This was craziness. It was crazier than Dumbledore, crazier than Cockroach Clusters, crazier then-

He froze. Neville walked right into him and jostled him, but they didn't end on the floor and that was the most important thing for the moment, because there, right in front of him, filling a half of the hall, was a group of soldiers, all of them in green uniforms, unarmed but still dangerous looking… And in front of them, in the uniform of the Commander and with an honorary sabre at her belt, stood a tall, veela-like young woman.

"Mina?"

x

"Jonathan?" Integra said so dumbly she might have kicked herself. She should have expected to meet him again one day, but too much happened and daily lethal danger pushed a chance meeting with an odd stranger out of her mind. She had had someone do the reconnaissance on the few things she had gleaned, but the person was most likely dead now and she had never read the report (if it existed at all).

The boy, now two years older and much wearier, was still as annoyingly different from all the human sheep around him as before. As though he had stepped out of a child's tale, with his wildly flying black hair (messy hair in Buckingham palace! And she didn't even have to pay to see it!), sparkling green eyes and the stupidest glasses worn by anyone that was not Alucard. At least they were not yellow.

"Hi," he said nervously, grinning.

A red-haired young female at his shoulder glared at Integra, who couldn't have been fazed if she had tried. The school-girl wore an impractical – if lavish – dress of an unconventional cut that could not have hidden a weapon unless it was strapped to her thigh, thus if she needed it she would have had to search for it under that multitude of skirts for half an hour before she would find it. Obviously, not a threat.

Jonathan turned away from his companions, and did a little smile that sparked a tiny déjà vu. "I didn't expect to meet you here."

"You should have," Integra said, shrugging, while she watched in the large mirrors on the wall how her men regrouped behind her, directed by Walter who was standing a bit off to the side, looking inconspicuous. "I'm in and out of this place."

"Wow…" Jonathan said – in the exact same mildly awed tone as he had used two years ago when she had jumped over a fence. He glanced around himself and shivered.

Integra, with wry amusement, noted that he was more intimidated by the building than by the soldiers in front of him.

"What brings you here then?" she inquired, regarding yet not heeding Walter's hand-signs.

Jonathan shrugged again, looking somewhat lost. "I don't know," he complained and glared at a young woman behind him that held herself like a teacher – straight-backed and strict. "She does," he grumbled, "but she wouldn't tell me. I suspect they couldn't have dragged me here with a pair of hippogriffs if they had told me."

He really was like a fairy-tale escapee, down to the metaphors he used.

"We will see," Integra replied, not really good at encouragement. She stepped up, proud when she managed not to laugh at the red-head's bristling, and leaned closer to Jonathan, lowering her voice to add: "In a few hours. Her Highness isn't really very fast. If I didn't know better, I would say she _enjoys_ the ceremonies."

"_Ceremonies_," Jonathan repeated in a cold voice, glaring at his stern companion, who initially cringed, but then drew herself taller and adopted a haughty expression.

"It won't kill you," the young woman said.

Jonathan clearly believed it might. Integra sympathised. A moment later the double-winged opened and Jonathan went a little green.

Integra smiled. "It will not kill you."

He flashed her a deer-in-headlights expression and then, suddenly, he straightened his spine and inexplicably became the very picture of a fairy-tale hero. The red-head at his shoulder swooned.

Integra in a split-second reevaluated her acquaintance.

"You'll have to tell me about your war," she said, startling Jonathan's entourage. They seemed to dislike her greatly. Two years ago she would have been bitter about it, now it was but a source of mild amusement. In two more years, she suspected, she would hardly notice it. Already she was too accustomed to seeing corpses of these 'ordinary' people to be anything but indifferent about whether she inspired confidence in them. If they were alive, she was doing her job well.

"Afterward?" he asked, and then the crowd was moving and they hardly had time enough to smile their mutual agreement before they were separated and swept inside the small ballroom: Jonathan in a group of teenagers, Integra surrounded by half of her soldiers.

"You have an interesting friend, Sir Integra," Walter remarked with a faint tinge of reproach, which was as much disappointment in her as he ever showed; he apparently disliked that Integra knew someone he had never heard of – someone that had not been thoroughly vetted.

Showing no emotion, Integra glued her eyes to the Queen and, with a hand on the hilt of her sabre, stood at attention.

x

After what felt like three hours, but most likely wasn't more than one, Harry's legs were as numb as his mind. He stared at the wall above the woman that, he was informed, was his Queen, and wondered where the heck had this all-important personage been when Death Eaters were murdering children.

He understood the necessity of this play-act and was willing to go through it, because there wasn't the judicial system in Britain (whether wizarding or muggle) that would prosecute him for the same reason why the Royalty had honoured him. It was good to know that if someone would decide, twenty years from now, that they don't need the former Boy Who Lived in their way, Harry would not be charged with the murder of Tom Riddle.

Harry's legs disagreed with the procedure, but he was cynical enough to acknowledge that Elisabeth deserved her bit of gleeful cruelty toward her unappreciative subjects.

"Come forth, Harry James Potter!" exclaimed a man in a ceremonial costume, which looked like it had survived centuries under an Endurance Spell.

Harry couldn't find it in himself to be surprised. He walked forwards, stopping just in front of the step up to the throne, keeping his eyes forwards and his back so straight it was painful. Having his friends in the crowd bothered him little, but the other fifty people – ceremonials, soldiers, Knights and _royals_ – those were observing him too. It was like the Great Hall after a new rumour spread, only filled with incomparably more important people.

"Kneel, Harry James Potter."

This was swiftly getting ridiculous. Harry obeyed, of course, but it made him feel yet more on edge than he had been before. His fingers were itching for his wand and his senses extended, so that he was hyperaware of the movements of all the people in the room. Hardly anyone moved, in fact. The ceremonial stepped away, leaving the kneeling Harry alone in the middle of all those looks.

Silence fell – the kind of silence where none of the audience dared to whisper, or even scratch their nose for fear they would disturb it and garner attention. He felt like a rabbit they were going to have for dinner. Still, he wasn't going to go quietly. If he had ever been good at anything, it was surviving.

"We, Our Majesty, by the Grace of God Queen Elisabeth the Second of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, recognise the service of Harry James Potter to Our Kingdom. At the tender age of seventeen years, this man stood up against the self-proclaimed criminal Warlord Tom Marvolo Riddle, murderer of hundreds of British citizens, defeated him at a great personal cost, and sought no recognition or remuneration."

The words were coming from the aged woman in splendid gown in front of him – the _Queen_ – but Harry couldn't find rhyme or reason to them. The sentences were too long, too loquacious, and they had little to do with him. Yes, he had known Tom Marvolo Riddle, and he had hated him and fought him, but he had had no choice…

"We are most impressed by this man's deeds, and wish that he were as great a servant to the crown in the future-"

Servant? Harry wasn't a damn servant to anyone!

"-and therefore We bestow upon him the honour of the Knight of the Round Table."

There was finally a murmur from the crowd, a shocked susurrus of disapproval. Harry was almost glad he had no idea what had just happened, because he was less likely to blow his top in public like this. He hoped his soul had not just been signed over to the Devil – or the God, or any other deity. Harry managed to keep his face straight while the fifty-some people stared at him, but he was hellbent on retracting his friendship from, if not outright kill, Hermione. He especially hated that she really meant well and, technically, he had no moral ground for vengeance.

"Rise, _Sir_ Harry Potter."

The ceremonial approached and placed a sabre into his hands. Harry gripped it, without the slightest idea of what to do with it. This was _bloody ridiculous_. He – Harry, an eighteen-year-old barely graduated wizard – was a damned Knight.

He bowed and took his place in the crowd, far yet from comprehending what had just happened to him, childishly devising ways to use his new status to get back at Hermione for forcing him to go through this without preparation, but she was probably so proud of him right now that it would only make her happier. He would have to be craftier than that.

He gritted his teeth and tried – futilely – to convince himself to be patient. The rest of the wait was positively hellish, but eventually the neverending ceremony had to end. Harry's legs screamed in protest, but he refused to show it while he was in the spotlight.

"Jonathan!" a female voice called him on the way to the exit.

Harry turned, amused and appreciative that she still used his cognomen, whether in jest or because _he_ still didn't know _her_ name.

"You were right," he told her, bracing himself against the scowls of her – and his own – bodyguards. "It didn't kill me… but it was a damn near thing."

He noted the weapons changing hands, passed from those soldiers that had been waiting outside and guarding the room to those who had gone inside with their Commander. Mina's eyes glided from one ornate mirror to another, following the departure of the huddle of older men with sabres on their belts.

Glancing at the blade in his hands, Harry made a guess that those were his fellows in the Order of… what was it again?

"If you could keep your melodrama in check," Mina said with a hint of exasperation, "I would like to invite you for tea – and talk."

Harry ignored Ginny tugging on his sleeve and inclined his head, thinking. He needed someone to explain about the mess he had just been sunk into, and it would have to be someone he trusted. A distant memory resonated, and while his curiosity drove him to find out as much about the mystery that was Mina, his Slytherin sense of self-preservation urged him to be cautious.

"Vlad wouldn't mind?" he asked.

The butler, standing on the edge of Mina's group, paled rapidly. The soldiers shifted and Harry became hyper-aware of them and the firepower they wielded – the ones inside the ballroom might have left their weapons outside, but they had already re-kitted, and looked unhappy… kind of… in a way a marble statue can look unhappy.

Mina smiled viciously. "Just let him try anything…" she said darkly. Apparently, the dynamics have changed and Lord Dracula was being kenneled by his mortal lady.

"I'd be delighted, provided you can guarantee my continued wellbeing."

"Don't, Harry!" Ginny practically ordered. Harry swiftly extricated his robe from her grasp and stepped out of her reach. She moved to follow, but Hermione caught her arm before glaring at Harry.

"Are you sure? It doesn't sound safe…"

Harry, for whatever reason, felt that he could trust Mina. That didn't mean he would rely on her, but he had his wand on himself and no qualms about using it.

"Neither was the hunt for Horcruxes," he said with a shrug.

"You cannot seriously compare that!"

Harry seriously did. He glanced at Ron to ask his opinion, but Ron's eyes were quite affixed to Mina's uniform-clad chest. Luna was still gazing off into space, which he tentatively interpreted as her default approval with his decision.

Neville hummed. "You're sure you don't want me to go with you?"

Harry honestly couldn't imagine it. Or perhaps he could, but he wanted to go on his own, like a stupid Gryffindor, like a child hero. He didn't want another in the danger with him, and he didn't want to share the experience. Maybe, one day, he would introduce his friends to Mina, but for now the _other_ war would have to remain a secret to his friends.

"No. I'll be alright."

x

"Sir-"

"He's coming with me," Integra said, leaving no room for debate. The Captain nodded and stepped back. Jonathan – _Harry_, she recalled with a hint of marvel; it was still difficult for her to think of _Jonathan_ as a _Harry_ – stepped up next to her, waving goodbye to his companions, seemingly unconcerned about the armed force that practically enveloped them as they walked side by side through the wide corridor toward the side exit.

Cars were waiting there, and Walter had somehow slithered into the front of their procession and was holding the door open for them. Integra ducked in and moved over, making space for Jonathan. He sat and put his new sabre across his knees, looking uncomfortable. Walter closed the door and circled the car to sit next to the driver – for the first time since Integra could remember. He made it look so natural that it wouldn't have occurred to Jonathan just how much he disrupted the usual order of things.

"I threw a wrench in the works, didn't I?" Jonathan asked, smiling at her. He seemed to delight in disrupting her world-view.

"Going by experience, the protocols don't work more often than they do. I wouldn't let regulation stop me," Integra replied.

For whatever reason, that made him laugh. The car moved and he leant back into the leather, watching London pass by. Pellets of rain splattered against the windshield and the wheels sent sheets of rain over the walkways.

"After all, what are regulations worth in times of war?"

"I feel almost lucky," Jonathan replied. His thumb absently stroked the sheath. He looked up, with eyes as weary as Integra remembered them, but a degree of content in his face that was new. "My war seems to have passed over so quickly… It did not, really, it had gone on for decades, but I have been there for seven years and then it was over. At that time it seemed like the world was ending. Now…" He shook his head.

"Now what?" Integra prodded, wondering herself what the world would be like if the war was over. It never would be, of course – for her it would end only with her death – but the idea was fascinating.

Jonathan shrugged. "Now I've been knighted for doing my damn best to stay alive, and a woman I've hardly heard about all my life expects me to serve her. Why?"

Integra contemplated it. The answer was simple, but it was a reasoning with no depth behind it. The truth was that as she had become older and her thinking more complex, so had Jonathan, and the world around them presented more difficult problems for them to solve. They had been chosen, by accident of birth, to be there in the front lines, standing between the sheep and the wolf.

"Because that is who we are, _Sir Harry_. We are the servants."

He sneered, and Integra was surprised to see his face could turn so ugly. "I didn't sign up for this!" he snarled. "I fought when I had to, but I didn't _volunteer_!"

Integra honestly did not know what to tell him. She had not volunteered for anything either, but she had been raised to think of her service to the country as her holy duty and honour. She taught herself to think of Hellsing as her source of power and the sense of her life. Who would she be without her fight?

Nobody. She would have nothing. Morbidly, she realised that she wouldn't have a chance on a smidgen of respect from Alucard, and that was a pathological way of defining herself, indeed.

Nothing of that was anything she could have told Jonathan.

"But if you didn't have to fight, you _would_ have volunteered," she said in the end. It was what she would have done.

Jonathan didn't reply.

x

They arrived at dusk.

Mina, to whom it finally occurred to introduce herself as _Sir_ (not Dame, without explanation for the oddity) Integral Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, the commanding officer of the Hellsing Organisation and a Knight of the Round Table since she was thirteen, explained to him in fairly vague terms what was the purpose of the armed forces she commanded and where they resided. Hellsing Manor therefore didn't come as much of a surprise: it was monochromatic, dreary and foreboding.

"He must like it here," Harry remarked after he climbed out of the car – the door was again held open by the omnipresent butler.

Mina snorted and patted her front pockets. The possibly last thing he expected was for her to recover a cigar and put it in her mouth. He was probably gaping while she lit it up and pulled a draught. She breathed out a little cloud that stunk of nicotine.

"I don't suppose you smoke," she stated rather than asked, and set out toward the gates.

"I don't," Harry replied, keeping the distance of a few steps, because the cigar really smelled bad. It was nearly painful to see such a beautiful woman do something so disgusting.

As if she heard his thoughts, she laughed. The butler held one wing of the front door open for them and Harry hurried up – it was better to breathe the smoke than to stay outside in the cold and rain.

The inside of the Manor was very different from the palace. There was little decoration and hardly any paintings. The walls were mostly bare and, when Harry paid attention, he noticed the amount of security – men who saluted when Mina passed and cameras installed in ceiling corners. This was a fortress. It made sense, but he still hadn't expected it.

"The parlor is ready for you and your guest, Sir Integra," the butler informed Mina. "Will Sir Harry be staying for dinner?"

Harry winced at the address, but Mina didn't even blink. She ordered dinner to be ready by nine o'clock (obviously the schedule was a bit different in this place) and decided without asking for Harry's input that he would be present for it. He was more amused than offended, still so out of his depth that he was glad she had spared him the decision.

"We won't go to the parlor, though," Mina continued. "I have work to do. We'll be in my office."

When Harry remained standing still, perplexed by the proceedings, she gripped his forearm and pulled him along, letting go only after she was certain that he was managing to walk on his own. She walked up a wide staircase, passed several more saluting uniformed men (no women, though) and led Harry into a vast – absurdly vast – room with nothing in it but a checkboard floor, a checkboard carpet and a desk on the opposite end, with one chair on either side. Paradoxically, for such a well-defended place – the 'office' had a row of floor-to-ceiling windows covered with nothing but thin curtains.

"Take a seat. Walter will be in momentarily. I have to look at the inbox."

Harry obediently sat down. Mina sank into her chair with a sigh of relief and immediately reached for a stack of – standard muggle A4 – paper that rose higher in the upper left corner due to the amount of staples it contained. Within a minute the door opened; Mina only glanced that way and then ducked back. Her eyes followed the lines of whatever document while the butler – _Walter_, apparently – crossed the expanse of space and settled a tray with the oddest collection of tableware onto a vacant part of the desk. There was a teapot, two cups, a bowl with sugar and a tiny jar of milk, a plate of crumpets, an open bottle of wine and two wine glasses, and an ashtray.

The butler picked up the old ashtray, sitting close to Mina's left elbow, full of ash and the ends of cigars (including the one she had finished smoking just now), and went off, looking quite like a man on a mission all the while. Harry was a little disconcerted by the grace he displayed: like he wasn't a butler in the first place, only as an afterthought-

"You can set it down, now," Mina spoke suddenly.

Harry looked up, but following her eyes to what she was speaking of turned to be quite impossible, as she was still occupied by the paperwork, so he had to stop and think. What could he set down-

Oh. He was still holding the sabre – patches of sweat from his palms were already staining the sheath. He gingerly propped it against the side of the desk and leant back, watching as Mina pushed strands of Malfoy-blond hair out of her face with annoyance. She was unearthly – hardly older than he and already a head of a military organisation for years, silvery-blonde despite her dark skin, and scarily smart while clinging to an ideology that was, frankly, _limping_.

"This is ridiculous," Harry said when he felt the silence had been going on for too long. "I am not a Knight – I can't be. I want to get married and have kids – after Auror training – but I'm an ordinary w-"

He shut up. He had almost said too much.

Mina was now staring at him over the table – like McGonagall would, or maybe Dumbledore once upon a time, except that she wasn't peering over her glasses like they were wont to do but gazing straight through the lenses. Her right eye was completely obscured by the reflection of the artificial light – no candles in here.

"An ordinary what?" she asked.

Harry looked away. "That's not the point," he muttered to the wall. "The point is that I have been, against my will, made a part of some kind of security organisation I know nothing of, that I've been forced to serve a personage I don't have a reason to respect so far… that I'm here and I don't know what I'm doing here." He turned to her and met her eyes – blue like Dumbledore's but cold, calculating, and free of the patronising twinkle. "I've hoped that you might help me make sense of this."

Mina held his eyes for a while and then she nodded. "I think I understand your position. Pour the tea, and I will tell you about who the Convention of Twelve are and what is their purpose."

x

Integra supposed she should be patient with Jonathan. She had been bred and nurtured for a life of servitude to the Queen and the Church, and even so the transition from childhood to warfare had been difficult for her. She had had Walter's help and Alucard's mocking but unfailing support. She still wasn't quite the leader her men deserved, but she was slowly and surely getting there.

She understood Jonathan's anger and she was _very_ glad that he wasn't prone to hysterics. He listened to her describe the Round (Oval, if one wanted to be technical) Table, its other eleven members and their respective fields of competence. Nothing, though, appeased him – he still felt injured. He might have been the only person in the world who felt bitter about being knighted.

"Are you going to tell me about your war, _Harry_?" Integra asked eventually, shifting in her armchair.

"I will try to tell you as much as I can-"

"As you can claim clearance due to your Knighthood," Integra interrupted him, "so I can claim clearance due to mine. We are both technically members of an Order charged with the safety of our country – the Convention of Twelve." She was quickly becoming annoyed at having to repeat herself.

"And I am to be the thirteenth?" he asked incredulously. "Thanks but no, thanks."

"Hardly," Integra shook her head. She couldn't imagine it, either; she was having enough trouble to maintain her position among them. They would not deal well with another child added; never mind that there was no historical precedent for a fourteenth member (the thirteenth was the ruling monarch). Jonathan's title was, at the moment, an unsubstantial honourific. "I did say 'technically'."

"Brilliant," he sighed, "here I go, breaking the rules again." His gaze rested on the sabre. Integra agreed that the weapon was pretty substantial, and her statement might have been an attempt to placate him with a white lie because she was losing her patience.

"Can you honestly tell me that if you were asked to defend Britain – whether against a danger without or within it – that you would refuse?"

"No, I would not," he replied, faster than he could have thought about it. Although, as Integra knew him – which, admittedly, wasn't very well – he had thought about it in the past often enough to be thoroughly sick of the topic. She knew that his enemy – the Tom Marvolo Riddle, whom Jonathan had called by another name that she couldn't recall – despite having posed as a 'warlord' had not been noticed by the intelligence of either member of the Round Table. Whoever had allegedly murdered hundreds of people on British soil in the span of decades had not been picked up by the police or the media, and that frightened her.

Jonathan was clearly dealing with something supernatural – a different supernatural problem than her own, and apparently even the supernatural problems weren't aware of one another, lest they would have either started a power struggle or joined forces. Nonetheless, what would be Jonathan's reaction to Alucard?

It was already dark outside; the moon would be rising any minute now and Alucard would inadvertently wander in, curious like a blood-thirsty kitten and at his sadistic best, deriving perverse amusement from terrorising the outsider.

Would Jonathan be able to withstand that kind of pressure?

She doubted it.

"Ah, but you might be surprised, Integra," a voice from the shadows replied to her thought, and she had to spend considerable effort to keep her face straight. Jonathan was standing, with his right palm covering the pocket of his robe, obviously on the verge of drawing a weapon, and staring to the right, trying to penetrate the darkness.

"I am a pessimist, Alucard," Integra replied easily, signing her name on the bill in front of her and putting it into the outbox. "If I am ever surprised, it is pleasant."

Jonathan figured out that he was not being insulted – it was good to know that the idea of mind-reading would not shock him incoherent – and that the entity interrupting their conversation was not a direct threat, so he sat down again, without ever revealing that mysterious weapon of his.

Alucard did not feel like playing hide and seek with a stranger who had not panicked upon hearing a voice without a body speak to them, and materialised in the room in his usual attire.

Jonathan cursorily measured him and inclined his head. "A pleasure to meet you, sir," he said civilly.

Alucard, surprised enough not to laugh into the face of the greeting, soundlessly walked closer, scrutinising Jonathan with a stare wholly inappropriate to direct at food. It irked Integra, especially when the boy's only reaction was meeting her eye and raising a questioning eyebrow, as though he expected her to adhere to the niceties and introduce them.

"That is not a reaction I get often," Alucard remarked. Jonathan understood that his attention was being requested and graciously conceded. Alucard found that – and whatever he saw in the boy's mind – amusing. "You are quite clever, for a mortal… but _so_ crude."

"Accusation of crudeness, Alucard, coming from _you_?" Integra asked, ostentatiously turning to the next of the never-ending forms that covered her desk. She was on her way to making absent lack of attention into an art.

"You have always known how to strike me where it hurts, my Master," the vampire shot back.

When she peeked out of the corner of her eye, he was studying her guest, probably in a vain attempt to return her dismissal.

As soon as Alucard came within reach, Jonathan rose. He looked perfectly benign, and not at all scared – which was probably a first in Integra's memory. Alucard scared everybody except her, discounting the instances when she thought for a moment that he wasn't coming back from a mission.

"Mr Tepes himself, I assume…?" Jonathan spoke a little too softly, offering a shallow bow in lieu of handshake. "It is an honour to make your acquaintance, sir."

"A polite dinner, how _quaint_."

Integra looked up with an almost tangible purpose. Alucard, like an obedient servant, met her eyes.

"You will not touch him," she commanded, "or otherwise harm him without a direct order from me. Do you understand?"

He muttered something. Jonathan squirmed in discomfort when she defined the possibility of her ordering an attack on him, but he seemed to recognise the necessity of a back-door in case he turned out to be an enemy. She didn't doubt that he had some kind of a back-door himself – perhaps a form of transportation or a familiar he considered dangerous enough to give him leverage.

"I didn't hear you," she reminded Alucard.

"Yes, Master; I understand and acknowledge your order," he said, turning away from her. She didn't care about the lack of respect he displayed for as long as he did follow her orders. Then he spoke to Jonathan: "I remember you."


	2. Despair Has Its Own Calms

A/N: Thanks for your feedback. Hopefully, the next chapter does not disappoint – it just grew and grew until I found out that nothing really happened and it was about time for it to end… so, it's kind of a transition chapter.  
In response to your questions: Nothing like Harker aspires to comply with both canons… except that Hellsing's timeline is a tiny bit tweaked so that Integra is about a year older than Harry. Ginny is jealous – frankly, who wouldn't be? As to why Alucard recognises Harry…  
Read and find out. Enjoy. Review. Cheers.

Brynn

x

Chapter Two: Despair Has Its Own Calms

x

Harry counted from zero to ten and then backwards. It didn't work. Somehow, having a vampire – and a crazily powerful one from the sight and feel of him – tell him that he remembered Harry was kind of like telling him there was another Horcrux hidden somewhere in the world. Counting didn't make him feel more balanced.

"You do?" he asked, shocked when his voice carried nary a trace of his internal turmoil. Apparently, after the amount of press conferences and Ministry functions he had been forced to attend over the course of past year, he was quite an accomplished actor. He imagined he might have gotten there earlier had he allowed the Hat to Sort him into Slytherin, but that was neither here nor there when he was being told by a vampire that-

"Indeed," the vampire said, grinning to display an impressive, but wholly unnecessary sets of fangs. A creature with as many souls hoarded as this one had to have, must have had some shape-shifting ability. The fangs were solely for the intimidation factor. Harry mentally compared the creature to Voldemort and found it lacking. It was most likely too vain to turn itself into a shape as monstrous as Voldemort's degenerated form had been.

It didn't make it any less powerful, of course, and Harry was grimly aware that he could not do anything that would be considered a threat to Vlad the Impaler.

He smiled.

Apparently, that was the one thing that could have startled the vampire.

"You are the mortal whose existence stopped Integra from doing something stupider two years ago," the vampire said. "And try to think of me as Alucard – even if your hostess has not bothered to introduce us – the constant shifting of address is distracting."

Harry laughed – he couldn't help it. Mina was staring at him as if he had lost his mind. He wasn't sure he hadn't.

"Jonathan?" she inquired. Possibly she had sedatives at hand specifically for the purpose of drugging the less than sane passers-by. He wouldn't be surprised in the slightest. The passers-by in this place must have needed tranquilising often.

"You need not be concerned about me, Mina," he told her – truthfully. What would he do with her concern? He could wear a plaque – 'Sir Integra Hellsing was concerned about me'. Only a tiny step up from 'Potter stinks'.

"Mina and Jonathan?" _Alucard_ said. His voice grated, like an aluminium spoon against an aluminium pot.

Harry guessed that meant that Alucard was angry. He did not see why – it was such an insignificant thing. Sure, the characters had created a spot of trouble for the fictional Count Dracula, but he could not imagine how that might bother this… this absurdly powerful being. What could there have been about Mina Harker to be a sore point? She was dead – only dust and maybe a little fertiliser for the plants on her grave. She wasn't important.

"You delight in mocking me, Master," Alucard expounded. "You are _nothing_ like Harker."

"Not like Harker," Harry agreed, shaking his head. Going on Stoker's book, _Integra_ was in many ways a lot like Mina Harker (independent and strong in her convictions), but Integra was also ungentle, not the tiniest bit deferential, and as removed from what the society considered proper as a woman could get – with perhaps the exception of Bellatrix Lestrange.

"Never like Harker," Integra concluded definitively, with the slightest shiver. "I am a Hellsing." There was stiff, aged pride behind the statement, the kind of pride that had matured generations ago, likely before it was prudent, and kept being passed from fathers to sons and daughters, reinforced with each new wearer – but at the same time the kind of pride that needed clinging to, because as soon as you let go for a moment it dissolved in the wind.

It was like Draco's pride of being a Malfoy or Walburga's of being a Black. It was ideals and facades and disregarding the individuality. Harry could virtually see it taking 'Mina', the young disillusioned girl, and shaping her into Sir Integra Hellsing, the Commander of the Hellsing Organisation. She was an amalgam of her name, her rank and the enemies she faced.

"Any relation to old Abraham?" he asked, fairly certain of the response he would get.

"I am his direct descendant."

"His _last_ descendant," the vampire added gleefully.

Harry understood why that would be so important to the vampire. For Mina – _Integra_ – and the entire Hellsing it was a big 'uh oh'. With the balance of power being as tenuous as the conversation from before two years suggested, if Integra weren't a virgin it might just put her into the category of 'food'…

Which instinct would be stronger in the vampire: the submissiveness, or the bloodlust?

That would make begetting an heir problematic.

"I suppose that does leave you in a bit of a bind," he remarked, grimacing in sympathy.

"How so?" she asked calmly. It must have been inconceivable to her that a stranger knew enough about vampires – about her life's work – to figure out the delicate nuances of living with one. There weren't many people with Outstanding Defence Against the Dark Arts N.E.W.T. running into beautiful young Commanders.

Harry felt uncomfortable speaking of it, but he had started, so he would have to be brave enough to finish. Integra must have been already aware of the problem, anyway, since there was no other logical reason for a girl of her age and attractiveness and amount of stress (and her circumstances – always surrounded by soldiers) to remain a virgin.

"Like looking for a way to achieve immaculate conception," he said, silently awarding himself points for phrasing.

Integra stared at him, for a brief but crucial moment struck mute.

It was the vampire who spoke: "This one might just survive, Master. Clever and bold-"

"I like to think that one day I shall be secure enough in my position to manage Alucard regardless of the state of my _chastity_," Integra stated gelidly.

Harry hoped that was true, but as his eyes wandered over to the impossibly tall figure clad in blood-red ankle-length coat, black suit, a red ribbon, yellow glasses and a hat – like a carnival escapee – his mind returned to the voice. It was deep, deeper than Sirius', and it made something inside Harry resonate. He told himself off strictly. Vampires had the skill to manipulate their victims, and he was damned if he let himself slide into the position of prey again.

Alucard had messy black hair, almost like Harry's own, and Harry hoped to Merlin that it was a stupid coincidence rather than a statement of some kind. If this creature was truly Vlad the Impaler, then he was one of the most powerful vampires in the world – if not _the_ most powerful. Changing his appearance would take him nary a thought. What did he look like really?

Harry was in over his head here, was he not?

x

Integra had thought that she had seen all facets to Alucard and all facets to humankind, but the interaction between Alucard and Jonathan was something entirely new to her, on both sides.

Alucard didn't tolerate mortals well; that was a long-established fact. He was bound to serve Integra, but on his own he maintained only a loose friendship with Walter and generally didn't get in the way of Hellsing soldiers. There was also a noticeable something in his interaction with Her Majesty the Queen, but Integra didn't want to think about that. Up until the instance of Jonathan, mankind had equaled food.

"At this rate you will be staying the night," she said, feeling – fatuously – left out. There was no end to the paperwork, and she did not intend to spend the entire night sitting over it. Already her eyes were watering.

She reached into her jacket and got out a cigar.

"I don't mean to impose," Jonathan said with the exact polite amount of discomfort; moreover, from the looks of it, it was genuine. He raked his hand through his hair, messing it up yet worse than it already was, and Integra welcomed the familiar smell of tobacco she had needed by this time. She sucked in a lungful of the smoke and counted to seven.

"There is enough of everything," she said, concluding the matter. "I would have expected you to be more worried about your minders' reactions."

Jonathan froze. His eyes darted around, searching for a clock. When he found it he groaned, sagged back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a few moments. Then he took a deep breath, straightened and stood.

"Give me a moment," he requested with a tight smile. "I have to let them know I'm alive before they try and storm your Headquarters." He turned his back on her and Integra rose, about to insist that he tell her what he was doing, but Alucard turned into a swarm of bats in exactly the same moment and flew out of the room through two windows, splitting into two flocks; one on Integra's either side.

"_Expecto Patronum_!" Jonathan called.

_Expecting a protector_? Integra had little time to study languages among the flood of other things she had been required to learn. The list of trivia she needed and didn't yet know was lengthening every day and she didn't have enough time to keep up with it. Further delegating wasn't realistic for someone in her position, unless she procured a sibling. Considering that both her parents were dead, that didn't sound particularly possible either.

With Alucard gone, the room instantly became warmer. Integra had not noticed it going colder; she was so accustomed to it that it didn't register anymore.

"Go on," Jonathan said. He was turned away, apparently not addressing her. He was _shining blue_. "Find Hermione."

A shape almost as tall as Jonathan made of that blue light that had seemed to envelope the boy stepped out and jumped for the window. It passed through the glass as though there wasn't anything there.

It appeared that Jonathan, as could have been expected, wasn't just a face and a name. He also had more than a passing familiarity with the occult.

"What was that?" Integra had her own library pertaining to the occult; most of the things in the books were heinous, but she had been raised to think of the needs of many and the will of God above the wants of few and flimsy morality. Still, it was something to use as rarely as possible, and always with good reasons.

"A Patronus," Jonathan replied, sticking his hands deep into the pockets of his robe. "It's an avatar made of positive emotion, a guardian against a certain kind of negative emotion, and an occasional messenger."

He made it sound perfectly benign. Integra had seen ethereal blue glowing animal shapes before, and some of them had even been messengers, but they had all collectively come straight from Hell.

Integra very much didn't like an eighteen year old British boy having a demon at his beck and call. She set her pen on top of the latest electricity bill that required her signature and the Hellsing stamp to be sent on to the royal palace's administration to sort out. "You use not only owls, but insubstantial venison as messengers?" she asked, hiding her disapproval behind the glint of glasses in artificial light, and feeling betrayed when Jonathan's spectacles glinted right back at her, obscuring his expression in return.

"Hedwig is dead," he said, and Integra felt she had intruded where she was not welcome, so she retreated, not nearly as interested in the fate of one trained bird as she was keen on learning about 'Riddle'. Walter had already done thorough reconnaissance on both Tom Marvolo Riddle and Harry James Potter, but the single sheet of paper he had delivered stated only that Integra was to be wary even though nothing suggested that the boy was either antagonistic or dangerous.

She simply wanted to hear his story, to find why the Knighting ceremony had been so private that only the members of the Convention had witnessed it (usually it would be public, a matter of pride, happening in front of the assembled House of Lords), to reason out why Tom Riddle's existence and actions had not been revealed even to the MI-6. The Queen had apparently known and yet the Royal Protestant Knights had not been informed about the existence of a group utilising the occult – on a fairly large scale, she guessed.

"Hmm…"

The noncommittal sound wasn't what Jonathan had wanted to hear, and he bore his disappointment with a lack of grace. "I suppose I should ask how _your_ pet is," he said, snide, "but he seemed _lively_ a minute ago, and I doubt anything had befallen him since then."

Integra absently turned so that she could see out of the windows. Half of her face was lit by moonlight, bright, blinding, and Alucard was somewhere in the distance, ripping into some lost existence and stealing their life and soul faster than they came to believe in his existence. It was the same story, night after night, and Jonathan was correct in pointing out that while animated, Alucard was not alive. The accusation had no weight, though, because Integra was not ashamed of having a servant that was a Midian – of fighting fire with fire.

"I'm sorry," the boy said then, and Integra waited for him to explain what he was being remorseful about. "Hedwig is one of the many I lost, and I'm not dealing with grief well. I'm just lashing out."

As long as all Jonathan did was make sarcastic remarks, Integra really didn't care. She leafed through the semi-haphazard pile of documentation she had put to the side and found Walter's abridged report; on its other side she wrote a set of orders regarding Jonathan and his accommodations for the night. Technically the boy had not acquiesced to spending the night, but unless he had a way of teleporting himself, he was stranded.

"You won your war, then?" Integra returned to the original topic with a lack of subtlety she feared she caught from Alucard. Jonathan was a young male so charming him should have been a child's play, but Integra had somewhere along the line lost the skill, as well as the ability to pretend weakness. Two years ago some of it must have been there still, but now she felt too stiff, too hardened to fake softness and feminity past what she naturally possessed as a mortal woman.

"Won?" Jonathan spat the word as if it burned the insides of his mouth. His grief was now mixed with disgust and he dealt with the volatile combination by getting angry on top of it – not unlike Integra herself would. He recovered his new sword and clutched it in both hands, so hard that his knuckles went white. She thought she saw tiny sparks falling off of him when he stated: "I ended it."

Integra shrugged. "With the kind of monsters we fight against, that comes to the same thing."

"It does not feel like it!" Jonathan objected. "My godson has been orphaned at three months old – younger than I had been, even. His father was the last link to my parents. At the risk of sounding melodramatic again, I lost what I considered the rest of my family."

He did sound melodramatic. Integra folded the report from Walter printed-side-in, leaving her own – barely-legible – writing on the outside. She pushed the buttons on the phone in a sequence that her fingers could type without supervision, saying: "You are hardly the first."

Jonathan snorted and muttered: "I should have expected that."

Integra felt pity for him and considered telling him so, but then the phone beeped and the light glowed green. Walter spoke out of the intercom and she ordered him to come up and to direct the maids to prepare a guest-room. With a click, the connection ceased and she directed her entire attention to Jonathan, who was staring at the ornate hilt with the kind of focused attention suggesting that he wasn't seeing it at all.

"It is not that I do not have compassion," Integra said, with a finger tracing the little silver cross on her neck, unable to feel its coldness through the layer of cloth, "I merely cannot allow myself to display it, or to let it affect my decisions in any way. In the end it is easier to disregard it wholly."

x

"Doesn't that kind of make you a monster?" Harry asked. When he heard himself say it, it sounded cruel. Still, when with wolves, howl at the moon. She started it.

That may have sounded childish, but it was the way of survival Dumbledore had taught him: to keep yourself inside your head and show the world what the world wanted to see. Harry had struggled with the lesson for seven years, but faced with dozens of cameras it made sense to shake the new Minister's hand and smile. Faced with Integra Hellsing it made sense to be irritable, because she was like that and patient people made her angry.

Integra took it with a humourless smile, and without a shred of discomfort. "I should have expected _that_."

"It is not that I do not have compassion," Harry repeated her own words back at her – a trick he had learnt from, surprise, _Draco Malfoy_, who had alluded to it being one of Snape's tactics. Allegedly Bellatrix had been particularly susceptible to it, so had Voldemort and anyone else who liked hearing themselves quoted.

Harry, though, apparently had yet to learn the correct amount of deference to put into such a statement for it to be poignant; it merely came across as petty and spiteful. "Sorry," he said again and then, because Integra may have had years of experience, but even she had not lived through everything: "I have seen what that kind of reasoning leads to in people with power. I never had to kill someone I considered a friend, and I would like to never be put in a situation when that might be necessary."

"You are shockingly wise at times, Sir Harry," said a voice from a place just behind Harry and he jumped out of the chair and spun, even though he recognised Walter. The butler had entered the room unnoticed, without a sound to advertise his presence. Harry should have expected him – Integra had requested his presence through the phone – but…

Harry gritted his teeth and scowled at the old man, only sitting down once Walter had circled the desk to accept a paper from Integra's hand. It was first then when it occurred to Harry what he had been just called and why.

He closed his eyes and moaned. "Godric's galoshes, spare me…"

Walter glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and adopted a patronising, McGonagall-like smile. "Then you say something that completely shatters that image."

Integra, in the meantime, seemed to be conducting the umpteenth thorough examination of Harry's face and possible motives. He had no idea what had prompted the scrutiny, but he bore it with silent, motionless impatience that came from exasperation, tiredness and these people's unvoiced expectations.

"You would consider me a friend?" Integra asked.

That was about the last thing Harry would have expected if he had been expecting anything at all. Had he called Integra a friend? He supposed it was possible – he had never been very good at keeping things from the people he liked.

"It's premature, yes," he said with a shrug, "but I've always gone more on instinct then reasoning. To tell the truth, usually things work out better when I don't follow my brain. Compliments from assorted family retainers aside," he glared at the butler, who maintained his benign expression the whole time, while his eyes held a cautious hostility, "I am not the sharpest tool in the shed."

"A mild psychic, perhaps?" Integra asked Walter, speaking over Harry's head even though he was yards away from them and in another direction. Was it possible that people as burdened as the head of the Hellsing Organisation and her right-hand-man must have been had enough time and mental reserves to expend on tormenting teenage newly-knighted wizards?

"Nothing that insidious, Sir Integra," Walter replied in exactly the same tone. They must have trained it. It seemed like the thing one would have to be able to do to survive among the stiff-necked nobles of the royal court. It was almost humorous, though Harry was not in the mood, to hear his life summed up as: "Rather a case of bad luck evened out by good luck – the kind of coincidence that was the origin of the idea of karma."

"And that is not insidious at all," Integra sniffed. She directed Walter to take away the untouched bottle of wine, too.

Harry had forgotten it was there – it had simply become a part of the scenery. Anyway, he was not a drinker, past the occasional sip of champagne at a Ministry do he was required to attend.

"A tall step down from telepathy," Walter summed up, spun on his heel and set out on the long trek to the door.

Harry wondered why he couldn't hear the clicking of his heels, but then he noticed just how far the carpet stretched.

"The dinner is ready, Sir Integra, whenever you find a moment." There was a faint note of disapproval in the butler's voice, as though it was par for Integra to miss meals… which it probably was. The amount of nicotine she took in on a more stressful day than today had been probably robbed her of appetite.

"I'm not keeping you from eating, am I?" Harry asked, and was immediately informed just how stupid a question that was by twin looks of stupefied incredulity. Harry shrugged and ran his hand through his hair. "I can eat whenever you could spare a moment," he added, and that sparked twin looks of recognition. 'I'm not keeping you from…' was a frame of sentence Harry had been taught by Neville when it became too obvious that he had no idea how to comport himself among the wizards and witches who thought themselves better based on their pedigree and corresponding manners. He had expected Integra to recognise it, but she was the type to understand a blade – or a gun – better than courtesy.

"I can do this later," Integra said with a barely suppressed sigh. She rubbed her eyes, then her temples, and then she stood, gesturing to Harry. "Walter would never forgive me if I dined in my office."

x

"I have only ever been once in a manor this big," Jonathan said while they descended the staircase. His eyes flittered over the displayed art and found nothing that he liked. The splendour repulsed him, evidently; he subconsciously walked a little closer to Integra and a little further from Walter, as though she – in her uniform – represented something simple, while Walter was a walking sign of riches.

"It _is_ different from London suburbia," she conceded. She should have thought of it, perhaps, but there were so many other things to take into consideration that Jonathan's discomfort caused by the building was basically irrelevant.

"Of the manor I was in," Jonathan continued, _finally_ volunteering some information, "I only saw the basement. They held us prisoners. They tortured Luna. Luna's father ran a newspaper and printed some articles that proclaimed support to me, and by the time they had already overrun the Ministry, so they took Luna as a hostage and forced him to print their propaganda."

The telling was disjointed, and Integra understood more about how Jonathan had felt than about what had actually happened. Kidnapping and extortion was something she couldn't remember dealing with; the lower Midians she usually exterminated as a rule didn't think forwards. The situation was unfamiliar to her. Torture was also something she didn't really understand and she was _not_ going to ask. Not today and not tomorrow. In time, perhaps, and Alucard or Walter were surely able to tell her more than this half-baked Knightling.

"Who were they?" she asked instead.

Walter held the door open for her and she stepped through, closely followed by Jonathan, who tried to edge away from Walter as much as was possible. It was humorous.

"They…" Jonathan said plaintively. For the first time since they had exited Integra's office he met her eyes, and then he flinched when Walter pulled a chair out for him.

Integra stifled a chuckle.

"They called themselves Death Eaters."

That didn't ring a bell.

"They considered themselves successors of the Knights of Walpurgis."

That one Integra had heard before, but she recalled no details. Walter nodded in recognition and would undoubtedly have the file ready for her as soon as she extricated herself from the presence of her guest.

"They were the terrorists?" she asked to clarify.

"Voldemort's henchmen." Jonathan paused, waiting for a reaction, and then he laughed at himself, shaking his head. "It's odd to be able to say the name without anybody flinching. People still, even a year after his death, prefer to refer to him as 'You-know-who'."

As far as cognomens went, that was neither very menacing, nor very imaginative.

A maid walked in then, carrying a steaming pot of soup, and Integra's stomach reminded her that she had not eaten since her early lunch. The talk ceased, as Integra had been conditioned to eat in silence by her governess in early childhood, and Jonathan somehow picked up on it.

Fifteen minutes later the dessert was brought, and Walter attempted to offer the wine for a second time, but Jonathan showed no interest whatsoever. Integra, having a rare night without any work she absolutely _had_ to attend to, decided to take advantage. She pulled the cork out, carelessly showing off bottle-opening skills that Jonathan noticed but didn't comment upon. The wine was dark red, lighter than blood, but still reminiscent of it. It wasn't a particularly healthy association to have, but she saw wine-glasses holding bodily fluids more often than holding alcohol.

"Her Majesty said you killed the… Voldemort," Integra said, not entirely happy about her bluntness.

Jonathan grimaced. "That was a way to sour the digesting."

Alucard might have been correct about this boy's crudeness, Integra thought. Then again, this may have been Jonathan's learnt manner of getting back at the world – to make the world unhappy.

"Yes, from a certain point of view that would be right," he acquiesced.

Integra pinned him with a cool stare.

"Well, I let him kill me… then returned to life… and let him kill me again. The second time it backfired."

Integra bit down on the dessert fork so hard she thought she had dented it. "You claim to have returned from death?"

Jonathan blinked at her, his green eyes wide and surprised, as though she had told him a wholly new thing, not simply restated what he had said. He chewed and mused on his answer, before finally shrugging. "I haven't thought of it like that. It's more like I returned from the… the limbo… I wasn't _fully_ dead."

"You are not undead," Integra said with unshakable certainty. Jonathan was one hundred percent mortal human.

"Not like that… not Dark magic…"

This time, unlike two years ago, Integra knew that the magic he spoke of was not metaphorical. He was describing real prophecies and real Dark Lords, humans so twisted that they fit into the category of Midians without having changed species.

"My mother sacrificed her life for me when I was one," Jonathan said, having set his fork down and pushed the half-eaten dessert away. His eyes implored Integra to accept his words, no matter how impossible it was to accept the idea of magic that transcended death, that broke the laws of nature and God, without it being evil. "There is a curse – a type of spell – that can end someone's life in an instance. It doesn't hurt and doesn't leave any marks-"

"Two words," Integra suddenly remembered. "The disturbing death that you spoke of."

She poured herself more wine.

Jonathan nodded. "Yes, that. My mother shielded me, _took it_ for me. It created a shield or something. It's theorised that it was her love that saved me when Voldemort cast the same spell on me, but it's all only hypothesis. No one knows what happened – why I didn't die."

"Your authorities expected you to survive based on the prophecy?" Integra asked, doing her best to connect the dots.

"Actually, my survival confirmed me as the subject of the prophecy. Based on it, _my_ authorities expected me to kill him," Jonathan said bitterly. He seemed to be on the verge of tears for a moment, but then he grimaced for a split second before reverting to the expressionless state he used as a mask when his emotions became too revealing for his liking.

"And you did," Integra finished for him. She was beginning to understand – that inconsolable boy she had met two years ago as well as the young man so disparaging of honour and duty that was sitting opposite her. He was given a mission to fulfill, one for which he had neither a natural predisposition nor training, and he didn't fail it out of sheer obstinacy and will to survive. It was, in a way, admirable, but it did not make him strong.

He could be given that training, though, and if his knowledge of the occult turned out to be useful to Hellsing's ends… "You do not, by chance, feel like joining the Organisation?" she asked.

Instantly she wished she had not. She was not nearly convinced about inviting him yet deeper into her world. The initial fascination she had felt was already fading away and leaving behind a picture that appeared great from distance but upon close look was but an amateurish attempt.

"Indeed, Sir Harry," said Alucard, sticking his head in through a wall, back from his hunt way too soon. Possibly the intrusion of a civilian into the Organisation was rare enough to be exciting for him.

Integra sighed and, when Walter considerately re-filled her glass, drank. If Jonathan insisted on being so annoyingly reticent and Alucard insisted on interrupting their conversations whenever they were approaching any subject of interest, she would have to keep her guest within the Manor for at least a week.

That was damn difficult to do without making it known to him that he was a prisoner.

x

As opposed to the butler whom Harry's subconscious had inexplicably filed as a threat, Alucard's unexpected entrance had not startled him. He had no time to contemplate it now – that would be left for when he was trying to fall asleep and then when he inevitably woke from a nightmare and didn't feel like going back to sleep – but there was something wrong about his subconscious' filing.

Harry had not anticipated being offered a job, but he was already accepted to the Auror Academy and looked forward to three more years of grasshopper student life, to training with his friends under his acquaintances, and to learning more Defence. Hermione was pressuring him to go for the Mastery, and he thought that he probably would: with his natural talent and her providing the motivation, why would he not? No, he was not going to give up his life when it looked like he was going to enjoy it for the first time, especially not for an existence filled with Darkness, violence and people's guts strewn over footpaths.

"It is one of the most _interesting_ jobs there are." Alucard added, crossing fully inside the dining hall. "Survival rate just above the kamikaze."

Harry chuckled. He was able to imagine it: it was like being an Auror, but _rougher_, like the hunt for Horcruxes…

But he had wanted to be free of that kind of responsibility for the longest time. The entire year, from the moment he walked out of the Burrow until the instance he woke up in the hospital wing from his thirty-six-hours post-final-battle sleep because Teddy was crying… the whole _age_ was a huge scar on his psyche, and he had not been particularly socially accomplished even before that.

"Well, I suppose I do have the credentials," he said neutrally.

"If your recent Knighthood is of any indication," Walter offered, briefly stepping out from the background. His forwardness was a clear indication that butler was only his secondary position.

Harry observed him more closely. The shadows he kept to whenever possible shrouded him like a dark cape, but even so his uniform didn't quite hide a wiry strength that Harry found impressive. Considering that the man could have been seventy years old, and by all indications _not_ a wizard, he was in a pretty damn amazing state.

He also could say exactly the right thing to remind people of the problems they had.

"Merlin, don't remind me…" Harry moaned. His newly-attained _undesired_ position was a source of future distress he didn't dare imagine. "It's a nightmare." And it was going to get much, much worse, especially if the Queen one day woke up and remembered that she had her personal knighted magician hidden somewhere in a proverbial cupboard and decided to pull him out, and have him dusted off and put on display for foreign dignitaries to stare at and envy her.

Alucard grinned, showing off two rows of glinting teeth. "Elisabeth used to be quite feisty, at about your age-"

"Spare me," Harry cut in hastily, before he was treated to a lecher's reminisce of the attributes of a woman that was not only a Queen, but also an _old_ lady. Harry's youthful libido wasn't sure it could have survived that.

Alucard's grin, if possible, widened. He walked out of the corner, straight to Harry's chair and without the tiniest unnecessary motion, but the sway of his coat made it look as if he sauntered. He leaned in, at first surprised when Harry didn't back away, then happy. "I like you, Harry Potter," he said, still grinning maniacally.

Harry met his eyes, vaguely disconcerted that the vampire might be reading his thoughts, but otherwise largely unaffected, because Integra's orders were still in effect. "And that scares me," he told the creature.

Alucard had eyes the same colour as Voldemort, but Voldemort's had been cruel and permanently narrowed in rage, whereas Alucard's tended to be cruel and wide in amusement or remembered exhilaration. Harry never would have been able to guess how much difference that would make.

"Liar," the vampire scoffed, trailing a finger down the side of Harry's face.

It made Harry smile uncontrollably, as though even a debatably-insane undead could spread good mood around himself simply by leering.

"I do not scare you."

Harry chuckled. "Perhaps." He would have very much liked to know why that was.

Alucard's hand paused on Harry's throat, the tips of his fingers rested mock-gently against the jugular. His grin subsided, but the fangs were still visible between his upturned lips. A couple of strands of hair sneaked over his shoulders, tickling Harry's hands, _tasting_. "You are not, and never will be mysterious to me," the vampire warned him, and Harry supposed that was a good thing – not mysterious hopefully made him unremarkable enough to not be worth crossing Integra's orders.

Harry honestly liked Alucard's personality (at least as long as he didn't see him bite and drain anybody), and it almost made him sad to realise he was leaving soon, possibly never to return. These people were too interesting to just fade out of his life just like that…

"Do you two want some privacy?" Integra asked with a sting. Alucard shifted into a straight posture, seemingly without any of the states in between – that made Harry think that he could have crossed the room just as fast, and he couldn't figure out what reason the vampire might have had for not startling him and laughing at his expense – and, in the middle of a veritable fountain of hair that in vain tried to catch up to him, bowed.

Integra didn't look up from her dessert, studiously concentrating on cutting it into tiny bits she was not going to eat anyway, to avoid seeing her pet vampire mocking her.

Walter, taking away Harry's discarded plate, gave his opinion: "Sir Integra… try and remember that you are a Lady, please."

Integra glared at Alucard, who was still folded and waiting for acknowledgement, and speared a strawberry. Lifting it in front of her face and studying it as if it was a diamond she considered buying, she objected: "I am a soldier first and foremost."

"If you want to be technical, first and foremost you are a human," said Alucard.

Harry's fingers tingled, like he wanted to reach out and touch the vampire. There was something uncontrollably enthralling about the vampire's enigma, and Harry had to repeat to himself that he was not going to be manipulated, he was not going to succumb to the thrall of Darkness, not now, not after all that he had faced and rejected, not when he had passed the trials fate stood before him…

Not when he finally knew who he wanted to be.

"Yes," Integra and Harry spoke at the same time, but only Harry continued to say: "and it's something we had to fight for before we got to keep it."

Integra, Walter and Alucard turned to him so fast that he almost cringed, but the injustice he had felt over the prophecy that he had never come to terms with welled within him and made him bear the gazes with all the injured self-righteousness he possessed.

"Thank you for your hospitality, Integra, Walter," he said with a marginal nod to both of them. "If you wish to, we can continue my interrogation tomorrow, but I'm too tired to deal with this now-" too weak and angry to trust himself not to succumb to Alucard's pull or attack in self-defence, "-and I'd like to get some rest. If possible."

He fell silent abruptly – even so he had told them more than he remembered and that was never a good sing. He tended to reveal things about himself when he ranted, and the last thing he needed now was to give them more ammunition against him. He had been so excited about meeting 'Mina' again, so excited about seeing her world and her fight and maybe being able to help in some, if insignificant, way… he had just done his saving people thing again without first checking whether there was someone to be saved.

Walter bowed. "Allow me to show you your room, Sir Harry."

Harry thanked him and followed on the butler's heels, aware of both Integra's and Alucard's eyes watching his every movement.

It probably could have gone worse.


	3. We Are On A Mission From God

A/N: Merry Christmas.

x

Chapter Three: We Are On a Mission From God

x

"You are showing off for him," Integra said when Jonathan was gone.

Alucard's grin shifted from expectant to exasperating – at least to her eyes. There was no reliable way of interpreting Alucard's facial expressions, so she had devised her own way to classify them. Most of the time, Integra could not care less about what her servant was feeling – it had been a fairly staggering realisation when it had occurred to her for the first time that he actually _did_ feel. It didn't even really matter what she was feeling. The only thing that was important was what she was thinking. Luckily for Britain, she was good at thinking.

Alucard wanted her to be annoyed. He was not bored and looking for cheap amusement, therefore he wanted to make her lose her temper so that she would not be able to think clearly, ergo he had something to hide.

"You are trying to make your power attractive to him…" she muttered. It was obvious when she let herself look. "…or _seductive_?"

Alucard's leer widened. Integra shivered and rapidly stood from the table. The vampire's frequent and descriptive remarks about his carnal desires were something she had gotten used to long ago, no matter how perverted they were, but he had never shown any interest in _any creature_ in the years she had known him. She was past uncomfortable with the idea of Alucard's interest in Jonathan.

"I have not entertained that idea…" Alucard said in a tone that, like his expression, meant nothing at all, "intriguing as it is."

Integra didn't believe him for a second. She, in the end, would not care about what Alucard did to the little mockery of Knighthood, as long as Jonathan survived it and didn't come back hell-bent on vengeance with his pet demons on his heels. Anyway, she still had work… to… do…

She came to a halt few steps short of the door. When she turned around, her servant was perched on the table next to the abandoned dessert plates, still grinning, but Integra saw something somewhere; it came from her subconscious, a conclusion made on the basis of knowledge she didn't know she possessed.

"You want him as your fledgling," she said. Her mind raced, presenting all the ramifications. She had, a minute ago, thought that she would require Jonathan to remain alive through his stay. She had expressly forbidden Alucard to touch or harm the boy, so he _needed_ her permission. It was unthinkably criminal. She wouldn't allow it… shouldn't allow it. Her Mission was to destroy vampires. Her conscience accepted the exception of Alucard, because he was just so _effective_, but _another_ vampire…?

No.

Except. Except…

She wondered what Walter would advise, but it was her decision, and she had to prove, to herself in the first place, that she could make a decision on her own. She appreciated Walter's input, but she didn't _need_ it.

"Well, if he is as stupid as to invite you," she concluded, implying the permission, and left before Alucard managed to convince her to allow him something more. She still had time to think about it, time to change her decision. Alucard enjoyed hunt too much to let Jonathan give in too quickly.

But what could have made him-

"I have prepared the reports for you, Sir Integra." Walter stepped from the shadow of the perpendicular hallway.

Integra nodded and fell into step next to him. Walter fluently slid half a step behind her and followed her to the intelligence centre. The team on shift jumped to attention and saluted when she entered; it was flattering, but wholly unnecessary, in her opinion. Fergusson, though, insisted that she needed to be shown respect at all times, lest the moral would slip or something.

"The files are open," Walter informed her.

Integra sank onto the empty swivel chair and typed in her password. The screen lit blue, politely greeting her by name, and she briefly wondered which idiot thought adding this feature would impress her, before the writing disappeared and a 'top secret' MI-6 document appeared.

"What is _that_?" she asked before she could overcome her shock and read the information for herself. Her eyes refused to move from the grotesque painting inserted instead of a photograph.

The soldiers uneasily shuffled further from her. Walter, on the other hand, understood her revulsion perfectly. "The only available portrait of Tom Marvolo Riddle, Sir Integra," he said with his customary evenness.

"Monstrous," she growled.

"Indeed," Walter agreed with a small smile. It might have been mocking, except that Integra had no patience for humour pertaining to her work and Walter knew and respected that. He leaned over Integra's shoulder and pressed Page Down. The picture disappeared and a screen full of uniform letters attracted Integra's attention with a tale no less fascinating than the portrait was – and no less heinous.

Occultism, mass-murder, armies of Midians, manufactured deathlessness and a collective mark stomach-clenchingly reminiscent of Alucard's seals… and an obsession with Harry James Potter since before the boy had been born.

Walter wordlessly lit the cigar she pulled out. She sucked in the nicotine and read on.

Maybe Jonathan wasn't the kind of scalawag she had thought him to be… maybe. Alucard's interest in him would support that theory, but she wasn't yet so far gone that she would let herself be manipulated by her servant's mind-games.

She would see for herself.

x

3rd of June 1999

x

Harry sat up straight from his dream and bit back a flood of obscenities. He leaned forwards, hugged his knees and rested his forehead on them. At least he wasn't screaming or crying anymore – that would be humiliating. The nightmares were not too frequent nowadays – it was Harry's own fault for having eaten a full dinner right before going to sleep – but the most horrifying memories didn't pale with time and Harry's subconscious could not be persuaded to cease dredging them up. After two years of war in the dark corners of his mind, Harry was becoming resigned to it.

He waited for the shaking and nausea to subside, and then climbed out of the bed. Dawn split the sky with a line of tentative pink, and Harry wished he could have opened the window and breathed in the fresh, moist air, but the frame wasn't equipped with a handle. There was central ventilation all through the manor, it seemed, and Merlin knew what type of security there was and what alarm Harry might have sounded if he were to try and open it with magic. Even so, he found that his room had a view of the back… not garden, more like a military training facility. He could hardly believe it. At-

"_Tempus_!"

-half past four in the morning, a squad of soldiers was wading through the mud in front of a low concrete building (that clashed terribly with the huge dark Victorian manor) at a pace that would have had Harry winded in under a minute. They rounded a corner of the house and disappeared out of sight; less than a minute later they reappeared, having circled what Harry believed to be barracks.

The squadron came to a halt and their commanding officer started them on a warm-up that, while short, made Harry's heart-rate increase just by watching. The ease of the men's motions was practically criminal, hinting at strength he could only dream about. He found himself mildly envious and very, very curious.

He transfigured his already transfigured night-clothes into something resembling sweatpants and a sweatshirt and Apparated. He landed in the thin grass with a crack not nearly as loud as a gunshot, but sharp enough to turn heads. The soldiers were all staring at him; the commanding officer and the guards on duty pulled their guns.

Harry lifted his hands and kind of wished he had thought it through. "Err… Don't shoot…?" he suggested timidly.

The guards didn't react, keeping their stony face like guards were supposed to, even though it kind of made them look like gargoyles.

The officer took a second look at Harry, barked at the soldiers to stand down and spoke to Harry: "Are you Sir Potter?"

"Yeah," Harry muttered. "I'm sorry; I didn't mean to disturb you."

The man looked mightily uncomfortable. He tried his best to hide his annoyance, but Harry had a lot of practice in perceiving when he was stepping on somebody's nerves. Merlin forbid the man would try and apologise for something that was Harry's fault in the first place.

"I'm-"

"Sorry," Harry cut him off swiftly. "I'm used to being aimed – and shot – at, so this doesn't bother me," he assured his audience, who still remained quite stony-faced. Naturally, he was used to being aimed at _with wands_ and being shot _spells_ at, but mortal danger remained mortal danger whether it was dressed in a robes or in cargo pants and camouflage t-shirts. On the other hand, it never really actually stopped bothering him.

"Very well, sir," the officer said uncertainly.

It appeared that no one knew what the protocol was for this situation. Harry had broken into a technically secret military training compound, but at the same time he was a guest of the Commander _and_, as Integra wouldn't stop insisting, a Knight of the Convention of Twelve, whatever that meant. Did either of that authorise his entrance, or was he trespassing?

"M'sorry," Harry repeated helplessly. The best thing would be to just Apparate back-

The officer gestured his men to continue their warm-up. They fell in line behind a black man that was strikingly thinner than most of them, but moved kind of like the pictures of Evan Rosier the Prophet had dug up somewhere in the post-Voldemort haze. Harry followed them with his eyes until they disappeared round the corner.

"If you'd like to come in, we have hot tea," the commanding officer offered, seeing the way Harry seemed to have curled up on himself as if he were cold. The morning was crisp, yes, but Harry had years since come into the habit of wearing warming charms on his pyjamas, and since he was still technically wearing them, the chill didn't register – except for his bare feet.

"I'd like to," Harry said, and experimentally smiled.

The effort was wasted. He followed the man to the door, next to which stood one of the armed soldiers, who actually held it open for them, making Harry feel like he was some kind of a noble. He had experienced similar behaviour in the wizarding world and yesterday from Walter 'the butler', but that didn't mean he was used to it.

The way people – muggles and wizards – sometimes couldn't meet his eyes, the deference, the fact that a great majority of them (in this case everyone) was older than Harry put him on edge. It made him feel that he could never live up to their expectations of him.

"I'm Sergeant Major Hudson," the man said. "I'm in charge of this barrack for the rest of the week, so if any of my men bother you, the Commander will take it out of my hide."

Harry understood the request. He didn't want any trouble, anyway. There was no need whatsoever to inform Integra of his early morning wandering.

The mess was an exceptionally bleak place, in no way comparable to the comfort of Hogwarts or the forced cheerfulness of an elementary school dining hall – the only other experiences Harry had with food service. Oddly enough, he liked it.

He sat down at an empty table and cradled the tin cup with steaming hot tea that Hudson had handed him. The man in question turned to a hunched-over (and, by his looks, hung-over, too) soldier half-asleep in a mess tin of grub, and raised his voice: "Wallace! Go get a uniform and a pair of boots. The Commander will have our balls, _roasted_, if we let her guest freeze."

x

Integra awoke shortly before eleven, after measly four hours of sleep, from a nightmare that delightfully combined her close and personal tête-à-tête's with Midians together with the rather gothic rendition of Tom Riddle she had seen earlier that day.

She had witnessed too many similarly mutilated and 'enhanced' beings to dismiss the portrait as inauthentic, and it filled her with uncomfortable suspicion of how wide-spread the use of Black Magic truly was. It seemed that her guest, the illustrious thirteenth Knight of the Round Table was one such user himself. It hardly came as a surprise: she knew little to nothing substantial about him, but from what she had managed to piece together, Harry Potter's guardians had been neglectful, perhaps intermittently abusive. The boy's adolescence had been filled with violence, he had recently been through a war, and he had never spoken to a psychologist, despite the not-so-subtle signs of PTSD he displayed.

His mere knowledge of and experience with Black Magic was raising alarms. The power he had hinted at (and, indeed, at times unveiled in her presence) made him into a walking ticking time-bomb. Add to that Alucard's apparent instant fascination…

They had a potential crisis at their hands, one that reached past the shores of Great Britain and past the Anglican Church. She would have to be (terrified) out of her mind before she warned Maxwell and company, but nevertheless this was a matter of global import. She wasn't nearly as righteous as to blind herself to the possibility of Jonathan following in the footsteps of his once-enemy and re-working himself into a vaguely humanoid package of demonic power.

She dressed quickly – she only ever dressed quickly these years – and decided that she was not nearly hungry enough to waste time on late breakfast. She sucked on a cigar instead and happily found herself able to think more and more clearly with every lungful of poison.

Walter simply turned up the second she exited her rooms, as if he had been waiting for her. He took a glance at her face and accepted her contemplative expression as a cue to remain silent and wait for her to reach her conclusions before he spoke.

It was imperative that Jonathan speak to a psychologist, Integra thought. She tried to devise a way of tricking him into it, preferably so that he wouldn't notice he was being interviewed, but unless she got Alucard to do it, which she knew was impossible due to too many things to count, that course of action wasn't feasible. It would be much easier, anyway, to simply inform Her Highness the Queen, and have her order the boy to attend an evaluation…

…but Integra had not figured him out yet. She wanted to do it herself, she wanted to be the one to win the game, and almost managed to convince herself that she was doing it simply for the practice so that she would be able to see through tricks and acting once she was facing real opponents.

She could just imagine Walter's disappointed expression if she ever voiced that particular train of thought. She could also – she gritted her teeth – imagine Alucard's low mocking laughter that grew and grew until it became a fit of hysterical mirth at her expense – except that Alucard would never find a situation void of bloodshed to be quite that amusing.

"It seems that I should learn to stop trusting my instincts," she mentioned as she stepped off the lowest step and turned in the direction of the kitchen. She was in no mood to circle the entire manor – her guards knew better than to slack in their duties, and she had no pressing need for an inspection – and the most expedient route led through the back entrance.

Walter, who followed at her left shoulder, like a bodyguard was wont to, took that as another cue.

"If something made you too angry to sleep for another hour, Sir Integra, I suspect you have a reason to think that."

Damn the man – an agreement and a query for more information in one, and he did nothing but say a phrase! Integra bitterly wished she were older, wiser, more weathered and more astute. Her youth was a weapon in and of itself, but it carried with itself the trappings of naivety and close-mindedness.

Fortunately, she had Walter to point out the grosser mistakes before she had a chance to make them.

"Why did you let me bring him to the manor?"

She did not see, but she was quite certain Walter had grinned for a moment before he became serious again and answered with the robot-like deference she was used to: "Your reaction to the boy would have been a reason enough, Integra. Her Highness' opinion of him was merely an encouragement."

"You think him a threat?" Integra rapidly rounded another corner and gave a couple of gossiping maids the fright of their life – or so it seemed from their melodramatic clutching at their chests. In all probability, they had been 'discussing' her.

"I am not suggesting you should fear your guest, Sir Integra."

Integra glanced over: despite the claim, Walter looked disquieted, and when something disquieted the Angel of Death, Integra would not be dismissing it.

"Jon- _Harry_," she corrected herself, for she had indulged her incorrect habit long enough, "has a deceptive air of harmlessness around him. I believe that he does not wish to sabotage or otherwise jeopardise us, but I don't trust that deception."

"In his defense, I suspect it is subconscious on his part. It is not his wish to deceive you."

Integra saw one major problem and waited for Walter to acknowledge it, but he didn't speak again. The silence became heavy, disturbed only by the clicking of their heels. Integra could tell that Walter expected her to reply, but the only thing she could have voiced was her disagreement-

Of course. The devilish non-smirking monocled Devil's advocate!

"If deception is instinctive to him, it hardly makes him more trustworthy," she said. It didn't necessarily make _Harry_ an enemy; however, it made it difficult to be reasonably certain of his amity. "He ought to have access to all the public amenities, but not more. I especially do not want him above the second floor or below ground level."

Walter did smirk visibly this time. It wasn't a command impressive enough to make him proud, but it had not disappointed him, and that meant that Integra had done well.

"I shall inform the Captain."

x

Harry had ducked from the range when he spied Integra approaching, and spent some time outside with the soldiers. Once he was dressed in a uniform, they seemed to gradually forget that he wasn't one of them, and became talkative.

He understood them much better than he understood Integra. She, frankly, made no sense, even in the odd instances when she actually intended to clarify what she was telling him. She deliberately left him wondering and floundering and making a fool of himself a lot – just like Albus Dumbledore had once upon a time, but Harry had no reason to believe that Integra Hellsing had an obscure benign reason for everything she was doing.

He listened to stories. The men got shifty-eyed and spoke quietly, but they liked having someone to share their tales with, and Integra was way too interesting a subject to remain unmentioned, Commander or not. He was initially a bit baffled by the title – Commander was a Navy rank, wasn't it? – before he figured out that it was simply a courtesy, since the young woman was literally the commander of the forces.

Anyway, it seemed that Integra had become 'the Commander' at the age of thirteen, which to Harry was, frankly, incomprehensible. He understood that kids could be hardened to bloodshed and death at an early age – heck, he himself had faced Voldemort, a basilisk, dementors, a werewolf and a seemingly insane Azkaban escapee at that age – but no amount of harsh experience could give a child the ability to lead. He recalled Integra when she was, if he counted correctly, eighteen, and she had seemed to him like a veteran then, but the words she had spoken were coloured with the simplism of a teenager's mind. She had offered definitive solutions, allowed no room for argument and clung to her opinion. All of that was well and good, all were useful qualities in a leader, but her inability to compromise made her too rigid… at least so he thought now. Back then, she had been a bit of an idol for him.

Harry returned to the range to watch even though his wrists hurt too badly for him to attempt shooting again soon. Shooting was interesting, and he had naturally welcome the chance to try it, but he had never realised just how _heavy_ a gun was.

"You'll have dinner with us?" one of the guys asked him, pulling off his earmuffs. He was called – or nicknamed – Mike, and had a tendency to sink into Gaelic whenever excited.

"I should probably get back to the manor," Harry replied hesitantly. He wasn't as stupid as to not understand 'detainment' and 'interrogation', no matter how sugar-coated they were. He was going to be in trouble anyway. What if Integra retracted her order that Alucard wasn't to harm him?

Mike froze, as if he just now recalled that Harry was in fact 'Sir Potter' or some such, and he gave a crisp salute that was totally out of proportion.

Unfortunately, no one agreed with Harry here. Mike and Stephen (an ex-Marine who walked with his feet wide as though he was on a ship, and hardly ever spoke) escorted him to the front doors, where Walter, as if he had expected them, was waiting to pick Harry up.

"The lost lamb found his way back to the herd?" the butler asked, amused, and uncompromisingly directed Harry through the splendor-cluttered hallways.

"More like 'was shepherded back'," Harry grumbled. Even though his hands were hurting, he had had fun with the Hellsing soldiers. They were solid men, neither good nor bad, but trained for warfare and therefore of mentality that Harry understood – and appreciated much better than the politicians'. "The lost lamb's field trip to greener pastures is over, and it's back to the pen for him."

Walter said nothing and Harry could not see his expression; still, it wasn't difficult to gauge that Harry was creating a dangerous enemy for himself. The day with simple men had made him relax too much, and he resolved to keep his mouth shut from now on and endure until Integra would have decided she had seen enough of him.

He could leave at any time, of course, but if Integra believed him a potential threat to herself, she would attempt to hound him down like a hungry wolf (or, to conform to the metaphor, a diligent sheepdog) and in the process reveal her organisation to the wizarding world. Escape wasn't worth _that_ hassle.

"In here, Sir Harry," the butler said simply.

Coupled with the proper gestures it may have sounded like a courtesy to someone; Harry heard the order loud and clear and obeyed with a mock-deferential incline of his head that was wasted on Walter, who didn't seem to pay attention to Harry.

The hair on the back of his neck stood as he entered the dining room. He inhaled deeply, but there was no particular scent – at least not one he could have smelled over the food – and no visible or audible reason for his reaction, so he inferred that Alucard was present. Surprisingly, the realisation offered a tiny comfort. He suspected there were as of yet un-researched vampiric abilities at play, that Alucard was keeping him malleable enough for Integra to dissect… although he couldn't see the point in such an action except to make him as uncomfortable as they possibly could. After all, why hadn't Alucard simply relayed all that he had learnt from Harry's mind? Someone like him would hardly care about the Statute of Secrecy.

Harry stared at his own reflection in the plate as he sat down. The Hellsing Organisation was very diplomatic about detention and interrogation – definitely enough to provide their prisoner with sufficient amounts of food, although that might have had something to do with the fact that he had been recently Knighted and thus there was a large likelihood that the Queen would sit down one day, wonder where her pet wizard had disappeared and ask for him.

Irrelevantly, he thought he would pay money to see the scene play out.

More to the point, he sniffed at the soup and reached for a bread-roll.

"Did you have an enjoyable day, Sir Harry?" Walter asked – for Integra, apparently, because she didn't have the awareness of etiquette necessary to manage small talk on her own. And because she liked to eat in silence.

"It was better than yesterday," Harry replied, sounding childish to himself, but it was to his advantage, so he didn't try to correct the impression.

Integra rapidly put down her cutlery, wiped her mouth with a napkin and stood. "I have work to do tonight. You will be alone in the Manor, Harry, but I trust that a decorated hero can observe the niceties and stick to the areas availed to him…?"

Harry accepted the jibe with a nod – he could see why she wouldn't like him Apparating all over her grounds – and stood as well. He wasn't very hungry; it was early for a Hellsing dinner, going on his observation from the day before, and he had eaten heartily enough with the soldiers. It would be another day before his body, still not unaccustomed to starvation, would demand more sustenance.

Besides, he could never be sure if the food they offered him wasn't doctored. He liked to believe so – in fact, he had gone on that belief up until now when he was faced with outright hostility for the first time – but he could not stake the continuous existence of the magical community on the chance that Integra would think drugging him _wasn't fair_.

"Hm," Integra grumbled, moving toward the exit, and deposited a cigar between her teeth. Walter swiftly offered her light, and she went off in a cloud of stinking smoke. Harry could hear her voice from the corridor: "I don't feel confident about this. Let Alucard keep the boy in line; taking him along on a recon mission would be redundant anyway-"

Harry scowled and moodily sank into the upholstered dining-room chair. Integra's parting monologue sounded almost authentic, except that if it was a simple reconnaissance mission, without the prospect of confrontation and with no need for Alucard's participation, then Integra had no reason to leave the Manor either. It was a set-up: she was leaving Harry here with Alucard and hoping for a particular outcome.

And, since Harry had no idea what that outcome was, he had no way of preventing it.

x

Integra let down the binoculars, stood, and inspected her knees. Yes, the uniform was ruined.

Walter, having seemingly dropped out of the inky blackness, offered her a hand to help her over the pile of rum.

She shook her head and climbed over it, deftly, but she knew she was too slow, too weak. She trained daily, and still she wasn't as physically able as she would wish. Walter kept reminding her that it was her purpose to think and feel, to provide directions and determination, but she had read the family records and knew that a day would come when the fight would be up to her and her alone. She had to become strong enough by then.

"Is this helping, Sir Integra?" Walter inquired, estimating all too accurately what she was thinking about.

She didn't have a clue.

What rankled most was that the urchin she had met two years ago in a middle-class hole of a town had been through it – and managed. A chauvinist could argue that Harry Potter was a boy, but she had had a chance to observe him for a few hours, and in a hand to hand fight he would not have had a chance against her, even then, and she had become faster and deadlier in the meantime.

She was tempted to dismiss it as a coincidence, as a case of the boy being lucky (as Walter suggested) or his antagonist having been somehow impaired, were it not for Alucard's reaction… And damn the vampire! For once he could forgo that aggravating game of his and answer her questions!

"Any losses?" she asked dully, overlooking the vehicles with the orange and black logos demarking them. Nothing had happened, all in all, except for one explosion, three destroyed freaks and one creature escaping. The worrying thing was that they weren't sure what it was.

"Two men wounded," Walter replied, as if he had some form of ESP on his own. "The preliminary pathogen tests were negative."

It was a poor relief, but it was one nevertheless. Integra slunk into the intelligence vehicle and barked: "Report!" at the three men sitting in front of the screens. She listened to them say in exact, albeit less than concise manner, that they had nothing of importance to tell her.

"It will aim for the den," Walter said from behind her.

Integra didn't acknowledge that; she had inferred as much herself. It was disconcerting at best, and she operationally decided to assign this group of the enemy the highest priority: tomorrow they would raid the den. If there was a new creature in the making, they had to be as fast as possible.

Suppressing a sigh, she stepped off the curb and aimed for her Rolls. The night that had been so suspiciously quiet after the explosion was waking again, and a gaggle of rubbernecks was gathering around the area circled with yellow tape. "I should have taken Alucard," she muttered.

Walter's lips quirked; it was like she felt it in the air rather than saw it out of the corner of her eye. Damn it! He could have told her as much himself – but hadn't. It was all part of the training, the never-ending regime that was to keep her from becoming belligerent. Moreover, she couldn't say anything about it, because she knew exactly what he would tell her: a time would come when she wouldn't have him to decide for her, so she had to learn to make her own mistakes and take responsibility for them.

She was just glad that they had no case of infection. She still wasn't certain that she could aim the barrel of her gun at one of her men and pull the trigger.

x

"If you get bored, will you just wander off?" Harry asked the empty room once he had assured and reassured the maids that he really wasn't hungry and they could take the rest of the food and dishes away (one of them, a corpulent middle-aged mothering type reminiscent somewhat of Molly Weasley, had insisted that he at least keep the basket with rolls, but he wasn't going to eat).

He wasn't very patient, but it turned out that Alucard was even less so. The electric light winked out and the sensation of the vampire's presence intensified, coming from several directions at the same time. Harry thought he could make out a semi-defined silhouette in the faint starlight. Good – it meant that Alucard wasn't trying to bullshit him with the stereotypical fanged bloodthirsty vampire image.

"Why the long face, Sir Harry?"

Harry suspected that Alucard was only calling him that because he knew how much it irked him; it was a good incentive to get over his pique, though, and lately the society pressed Harry to strive to be a better man. It was a tall order for anyone who – like Harry – had feet of clay.

"I'd like to know why I rub the people here wrong."

…at least the people that mattered. Not that there were people who _didn't matter_, generally, but the guards would just stare through him with eyes so glassy that Harry at times found himself searching for signs of breathing. Walter was being perfectly polite, of course – Walter was never anything but perfectly polite. Integra…

"It was stupid of me," he muttered. "People like her don't make friends."

"Hellsings are not social creatures," Alucard dismissed the whole problem.

Harry, no matter how much he tried, couldn't figure out why this absurdly powerful and unabashedly sadistic creature bothered to coddle him.

"Hellsings are persistent in getting what they want – and they want what they believe is God's will – and they are unparalleled in _using_ what is at their disposal." There was a suggestive emphasis on the word 'using', but it was empty of bitterness. Alucard did not mind being used, apparently, but he knew that Harry did, and knew how to play on it.

"Knowing how well you know me," Harry said, curious if it was possible to understand someone completely just from reading their mind (that would have had Snape in a snit, the old git-hero), "you are trying to poison me against Integra-"

"I need not exert myself."

The door flew open, and Harry understood his clue. He had a brief moment of doubt – Integra had obviously prepared this, staged it – but, as ever in Harry's life, curiosity won out and he walked into the hallway. There were fewer guards than before – at least he thought so – but he was certain that the cameras were manned, so he knew better than to do something that would be a reason for Integra to make his life yet more uncomfortable.

He received commands straight into his mind, without the interface of his senses, and it was more shocking than Legilimency, because it came out of nowhere. It was 'left', 'right', 'down the stairs' or 'Disillusion yourself' – nothing too difficult or compromising… except that, in the end, he stood in front of a heavy metal door in the basement, where, he was certain, he wasn't supposed to be.

"This will do it for me," Alucard said aloud, materialising behind and above Harry, and opened the door with a theatrical sweep of his hand – adding telekinesis to the already more than impressive arsenal. He bade Harry to precede him.

Harry stepped in and gasped. A moment later he gagged and went down to his knees with both hands pressed to his mouth to keep himself from vomiting on the rug.

Something covered him like a blanket and tightened into a cocoon, isolating him from the stomach-turning sensation. It was a different Darkness, wild and completely natural – the opposition to the perverted Darkness that filled the chamber. Harry almost gave himself over to this new power and its seductive freedom…

"Alucard?" he asked, stunned. A low laugh was his response. He experimentally opened his eyes.

There was a library in front of him, eerily reminiscent of the Black Library in Grimmauld Place. The tomes were old, splattered with various liquids: mostly blood. To Harry's left was a wooden table with deep cuts – or _scratches_ – in it. It was long, long enough for a seven-feet-tall man to lie on. Heavy chains hung from it. The rug ended three yards away, leaving cool naked stone, not chequered like in Integra's office, but monochromatic charcoal. A bookstand stood by one of its corners, with a book on it, prepared for Harry and open at a page that Alucard especially wanted him to see.

There was a pentagram with symbols Harry vaguely surmised were from different cultures, encircled by two annuli – the outer had writing he couldn't read, the inner was mostly English: HELLSING – HELLS GATE ARRESTED – GOTT MIT UNS – AND SHINE HEAVEN NOW.

"It means 'God with us'," Alucard explained the one part Harry wasn't certain on. He was standing just behind Harry's shoulder, shielding him from the evil accumulated in the room – because it was evil, Darkness as twisted as the Horcruxes.

"Fanatics," Harry whispered. "So far gone in their Faith that they would do anything… there is little more extreme they could have sunk to." The symbols in the outer annulus coincided with the letters in the inner – apparently they were a runic translation. It was sick, and its creator was apparently so proud of their creation that they had to sign it: HELLSING. _Nomen omen_.

"Abraham was not necessarily evil," Alucard spoke. The intangible cocoon around Harry rippled, like a mental shrug. "Only insane – a true genius."

"This enslaves you," Harry muttered. He knew little about Dark Arts and even less about runic magic, but he was intimately familiar with magic as such, and this was everything Harry had stood against in his ideals.

Alucard stretched his arms forwards and down, brushing Harry's sides; his hands entered Harry's field of vision. They were encased in white satin gloves with the very same picture imprinted on them. "I can hide them, but I cannot get rid of them." The movement of air he displaced ruffled Harry's hair.

Alucard morphed the gloves away. The symbols remained carved into the backs of his hands. Harry touched the fingers – they were _huge_, long and strong, and cold – and turned the hands over – there were mirror images of the pentagrams and writing bleeding into Alucard's palms.

Harry's throat tightened; for a moment he wanted to cry for the cruelty and the suffering displayed in front of him. Then he recalled that this exquisitely Dark, wild, uncontrollable creature had slaughtered thousands in outstandingly cruel fashions. If the sense of freedom bubbling just under Alucard's surface was ever to become reality and inflicted upon humankind, it would be carnage.

"I could…" Harry spoke without thinking. And that was what it came down to. That was what Alucard wanted. The vampire knew that Harry was a wizard – possibly had a better idea about Harry's amount of raw power than Harry himself had – and he gripped the chance with all eventual extremities. It wouldn't be too difficult – the solution was probably written in the same book.

"I'll let you read," Alucard replied and vanished, leaving behind only the cocoon that apparently could exist semi-independently.

Harry gingerly touched the yellowed pages and recoiled. It was too much for him; he felt like it was going to _infect_ him.

Then the page turned, seemingly on its own, but Harry could feel a strain on the power cloaking him; the pseudo-entity Alucard had left behind was not only independent, but also sentient and capable of interaction.

Harry was in _way_ over his head – and being watched.


	4. His Wrath May Quickly Kindle

A/N: Hello! Thanks, everybody who reviewed! In response to your questions: I'm probably going to disappoint some of you… and make others happy… but there's not going to be slash in this story, no matter the allusions made to it. If there was slash, I would have put it into the summary and among the warnings. Hopefully lack of hot Harry/Alucard won't make you stop reading. I happen to like that pairing, but this story is about something completely different.

Enjoy.

x

Chapter Four: His Wrath May Quickly Kindle

x

4th of June 1999

x

Harry had never been a fast reader, so he had gotten back to his room long after Integra had returned and with her the soldiers. He had never noticed when it happened; it was a completely ordinary thing to occur within the Manor, and the staff hardly blinked an eye anymore…

He was a little freaked out by the splatters of blood in the front hall, and a bit more when a maid came by and matter-of-factly started sweeping the floor. He watched her for a while, Disillusioned as Alucard had instructed him some six hours earlier, and then went on, up the stairs and searching for the room that was 'his'. He was too tired to care about the details like the doors opening and closing showing up on the security cameras. He didn't care that Integra would know what he had been doing; all he needed was plausible deniability, and that was assured sufficiently by the charm.

x

Integra accepted the folder from O'Brien's hands and skimmed the insides. Scowling, she crisply ordered him to lead the way and followed on his heels to the security centre. Already in an irritable mood, she noted that he kept fidgeting, nervous to be alone in her presence, without even the ever-present butler chaperoning. Such a mummy's boy, she thought unkindly, barely out of puberty – and, notably, at least two years older than her troublesome visitor.

"Show me the relevant footage," she barked at the casual officer on duty.

One of the engees jumped up from his swivel chair, rolled it over for her – and cowered when she glared at him. Ignoring the empty seat, she bent to the screen.

O'Brien sidled up on the other side of the soldier manning the keyboard. "Here," he said, needlessly pointing at the upper right corner of the monitor, where a door opened and closed on its own.

Ordinarily, she would have pinned it on Alucard's mind-games, but Alucard was supposed to have been keeping a few eyes on the little Knight. Logic and intuition joined forces and Integra was as certain as she could be that the invisible entity roaming her Manor was Harry Potter.

"Any more instances?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.

The point of view changed and Integra felt chill creeping up her spine. As if Harry had not been familiar enough with the occult; of all the rooms in the Manor to wander into…

"Alucard," she hissed. There was no way this could be a coincidence. The proverbial skeleton in her family's closet had once again found a way to make himself a nuisance, while still – technically – obeying her orders.

"Yes, Miss Hellsing?" a glib, disembodied voice spoke up.

The standing engee, who, incidentally, was still rooted to the spot, paled and trembled like a leaf. Integra took a closer look at his identification number. Hellsing Organisation didn't have time and resources to waste on lacking personnel.

"Alert me immediately if this occurs again," she said to O'Brien. "The security of the Manor is not compromised, but I want to know where that phantom goes and what he does there."

She straightened, thinking wistfully of finding an effective measure of reining in her vampire, and exited the room. The light outside was harsh, and she moodily wished that it would be raining again; tough luck, though, since the meteorologists anticipated another _nice_, bright day and another _nice_, bright night.

She stalked into her office and, feeling like she was going to fall asleep face-down in paperwork if she attempted to read, scribbled the engee's number onto the corner of some kind of useless checklist. Out of habit, she fished out a cigarette, stuck it into the corner of her mouth, and picked up the phone.

"Yes, Sir Integra?" Walter reacted promptly; wherever he was and whatever he was doing, he had not yet had the chance to go to sleep.

Integra considered ordering him to rest, but she could sooner convince Alucard that blood-packs were a more reasonable alternative to hunting. "Ge' me a thlang sunnary dithnithal note, ith you'the goth the tine…"

It was the testament to their years of cooperation (and to the frequency with which Integra indulged her vice of speaking with a cigar in her mouth) that Walter understood what she wanted without asking for clarification.

x

Harry woke up screaming.

Pale pinkish light of predawn mingled with the images in his head, and for several interminable heartbeats he believed he was sitting in the trough of a stream of blood, inhaling its cloying sweet smell and hearing the pleas of the dying. Insubstantial fingers brushed him as the lifeblood of the recently slain rushed past him, and he was bathed in it, imbued with the stolen power of hundreds, thousands-

It took him a while to realise he was sitting on a bed, with a mattress dipping under his butt and a stationary wave of covers over his thighs.

A droplet of cold sweat rolled down the axis of his nose and fell. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve and climbed out, into the chilly air of the early morning. His legs trembled under him, but he determinedly staggered to the bathroom, where he stuck his head under the faucet and let the shock of cold water reassure him that he was, indeed, awake and aware of reality.

The reality itself was _horrible_, _horrific_, _horrendous_… and that was putting it nicely. Five years ago (it seemed incredible that it was only five years and not five decades) the height of horror had been Voldemort's naked deformed self rising from a cauldron, combined with the morbid simplicity of the cut with which Pettigrew had severed his hand, driven in by Cedric Diggory's split-second death. Now he was, on the edge of hysteria, laughing at how traumatised he had been. Death could be learnt to deal with so easily, and the memory of Voldemort inspired more disgust than fear. Harry had seen a little of the true heinousness of human nature through the visions, but even that had not prepared him for the way true Monsters played.

It was _hard_ball.

With a soft groan, Harry turned off the water and cast a Drying Charm on his hair – it puffed up ridiculously, but at least he wasn't going to get brain-fever. That, on top of everything else, would be enough to make him pack up his wand, his new sabre and the couple of emergency galleons he kept on himself, and flee for the hills.

The funny thing was, he could have accepted Alucard's enslavement, even perhaps the inhumane handling which the Hellsings sometimes took as far as torture, because anyone who encountered Alucard and had even the tiniest notion of what the vampire was, had to accept that the usual values couldn't be used in relation with him. No, what had really struck Harry so hard that he felt like an iron fist was squeezing his heart and blood was being drained from his extremities, was the other side of the story. Abraham Hellsing's creation had been personalised; it had taken into account all known history of Vlad Tepes, from the time he had been a child, a hostage of Murad II, on whom the Turks had committed atrocities – Harry gulped to flush the bile rising up his throat – to his adulthood of exercising revenge of the most spectacular proportions until he had become the expert on painful death, to his own painful death which he had spread like a plague until Abraham stopped him.

Harry straightened, pausing to meet eyes with his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and whispered: "Are you looking over my shoulder all the time?"

There was no response. Jittery, Harry trudged back to the bedroom, found his glasses and flung himself onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying to figure out the game Alucard was playing with him. Having had had three hours of sleep, that proved impossible.

When, an hour or so later, shouting came from downstairs, Harry figured it was past six o'clock on a working day and therefore it wouldn't be considered too rude to contact anyone.

He selected Hermione, since she was usually the first one to get up, and cast: "_Expecto patronum_!"

Prongs shimmered and glowed, and some electronic device in the wall (presumably a surveillance camera, which kind of irritated Harry) sputtered and died.

Hermione was annoyingly good at picking up when he was lying, so he constructed a message that would be interpreted as him being perfectly alright and would, hopefully, keep the rescue mission off of Hellsing grounds: "I'm fine, Mione, but it's kind of boring. The most action I've seen was when I joined a couple of guys for their warm-up. Mina and I have a lot to talk about still, though, so I think I'll come home tomorrow… Sunday at the latest. Take care of everyone."

x

Integra's saving grace was that she didn't get migraines. Suffering debilitating headaches would have been crippling for her; as it was, her daily amounts of stress made her perpetually cranky.

No one ever told her so, of course. Her soldiers wouldn't dare, Alucard tended to laugh at her instead, and Walter – Walter had a way of looking at her that said, loud and clear, 'Sir Integra, do consider whether you are not becoming a slave to your emotions'. Damn right she let her feelings – annoyance, _rage_, hatred, _duty_, guilt – control her. She had once looked into a ghoul's face (the face of her Lieutenant) from a foot's distance, and saw exactly what she promised she never would become.

"At ease, soldiers," Integra barked, pushing the door to the range aside. This room was, aside from the security centre, the only neutral place where she and her men could communicate. Everywhere else she gave orders and they listened, but here they were so accustomed to her acting as civilly as she ever did that they didn't stop whatever they were doing when she entered.

She paused opposite the second target and waited until the man who was shooting at it used up all six bullets. When he stood down to reload, she tapped his shoulder.

"Wha- Commander!" he exclaimed, deafened by the muffs protecting his ears. He pulled them off and continued at normal volume: "How can I assist you?"

He sounded disconcerted, and Integra at first thought that she had somehow overdone it with her quest for respect and her men had begun to fear her, but then she realised that Walter the-ever-present-by-her-side for once wasn't, and that suggested some kind of calamity.

As a matter of fact, Integra had charged Walter with getting six hours of sleep minimum and then preparing the groundwork for tonight's raid on the vampire den.

"I want a report about Sir Harry Potter," she said.

Hudson frowned – Integra was adept enough at recognising the expression as one of concentration rather than disagreement – and recounted: "Sir Potter made contact with the squad at circa five hundred ten yesterday, during the morning exercise, Ma'am. No one saw him coming, and I hesitate to ascribe it to the guards' belligerence, because Sir Potter had personally implied such was his intention. I had engaged Sir Potter in a brief conversation and he had expressed the wish to join the men for a morning meal."

Integra waited for a while, but nothing more was forthcoming. Naturally, a Sergeant Major in charge of the barracks had enough work to do even without a teenage boy stumbling around.

Hudson let his .357 Magnum down and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Ma'am. Wallace and Potts would know more. I can call them up for you-"

"No, Sergeant Major," Integra cut him off, and gestured to the target. "Continue."

She spun on her heel – noticed Hudson saluting out of the corner of her eye – and strode away. Since both the named men had had a free day yesterday, they would be on duty now; it was just a matter of checking the roster.

They wouldn't tell her what she wanted to hear, anyway. If Harry had means to move around the manor undetected, why would he let her know by opening doors? Had it been a thoughtless mistake? Was he taunting her? Had he wanted her to know for another reason?

And then there was the worst suspicion of all: had Alucard put him up to it, and if so, what were they planning? And why would Harry let himself be dragged into it?

Integra's lips quirked in a smirk. Oh, yes. There were ways of gauging what men were really made of, and Harry Potter was exactly the type that would let himself be lured into peril.

x

Since Harry had witnessed Integra's interrogation of the officer at the shooting range, he had become aware that the young woman was investigating him. She had started with conversation and when that failed to yield satisfactory results, she had moved onto observation. As far as he was aware, he hadn't told either Mike or any of the other guys anything incriminating, so Integra would be switching methods again soon. The next, Harry was almost certain, would be testing.

He wondered, with a mixture of apprehension and excitement, how he would fare once they pitted their determinations against one another. It was another round of the game they had started two years ago in Little Whinging's playground; they were more experienced now, and the kid-gloves had come off, but it was still just playing. Integra, he believed, was superior in intellect to him; Harry, on the other hand, was a better player (Integra viewed herself with too stiff a seriousness) and had the advantage of anticipating her plans…

He made sure he was present in the parlour on time for lunch. Integra met him halfway for this stage, and turned up only three minutes late, according to the antique pendulum clock on the wall (Harry couldn't help but note that a digital clock would be more fitting, despite the undeniably historic outsides of the manor).

"Good afternoon," Harry said politely, smiling.

Integra's scowl deepened when she saw him; she set a folder down next to her forks, took a seat and put her booted foot up on the next upholstered chair.

"Good afternoon, Sir Harry, Sir Integra," said Walter, who seemed to have materialised in the doorway.

The hair on the back of Harry's neck rose. He fidgeted in his seat, and his right hand idly played with a butter knife. He didn't think the butler was a wizard, but he had a superhuman quality to him that made Harry's teeth tingle. Integra might or might not have been aware of it, and he for a moment considered alerting her to it, but then he figured out it was all just a game, like the Triwizard Tournament, and he had no obligations here past staying alive – and winning.

He set the knife down.

Integra put her boot back on the floor, leant forwards and, with a smile that set Harry even more on edge, pushed the folder she had brought to him.

Gingerly, Harry took it; it didn't bite – or tase – him, as he had half-expected.

"Read it," Integra encouraged him. For being 'in and out' of the Buckingham palace, she was a disappointingly mediocre actress, frightening her prey away instead of luring it closer before she struck.

Harry, nevertheless, obeyed. There were couple of underexposed black-and-green photos of what looked like ground zero. Harry shuffled the sheet protectors to the side, getting to the written text. Had he read this yesterday, he might have been affected by it, but his sense for horror had been fried at night and now he simply accepted that these things happened.

"Vampires… ghouls… plague…" he recited, noting that while he had been busy reading the report, someone had poured soup into the plate I front of him. He looked across the table at Integra, who was watching his every movement. "I respect the work you are doing here – I didn't need to see it black on white to believe you."

"That's what I was doing last night, while you were wandering around the manor," she said bluntly, successful in putting Harry into an uncomfortable position. She kept silent for a short while, giving him a chance to apologise, or possibly pull some half-assed explanation out of _somewhere_, but Harry said nothing and then she continued, before the effect of her accusation was lost: "I would like for you to join us tonight."

x

Harry's reaction was _almost_ satisfying, Integra mused with ambivalent feelings. He hadn't been able to just shrug off having been caught out of bounds, and he had, eventually, agreed to take part of the raid on the den. He even took the folder with him to familiarise himself with the situation…

Still, she was far from pleased. What irked her most was the fact that Harry hadn't shown the slightest surprise – as if he had expected the invitation. Alucard whispering into the boy's ear could have explained it, but she knew for a fact that Alucard had not been present within the manor between the instance when she had thought of the scheme and the time she had told Harry.

The boy was somehow deceiving her, she was sure. Annoyed, she reached into her pocket for a cigar and let the nails of her right hand drum on the tabletop. Law of the jungle, she thought. True heart, sharp reflexes and brute strength – that was the way to survival. She had been reared with that ideal in mind; a boy from London suburb could never come close to it.

Walter lit her cigar for her (that man was an _Angel_) and moved on, puttering around in the ever-busy way of butlers. "What do you seek to gain from this endeavour, Sir Integra?" he asked, on the verge of a sigh, as if Integra was some kind of errant teenager getting ready for yet another rebellion against her parents' authority. "It is unlike you to abandon yourself to such fancies."

"Why is Harry a member of the Order, Walter, can you tell me that?" Integra countered, exhaling a long, thin wisp of bluish smoke. She leant back in her chair, spine luxuriously arched against the hardwood skeleton, and watched the smoke travel to the ceiling where it dispersed.

She released another wisp and observed as it followed suit.

"You know the answer," Walter replied. He snagged a file from the top of the stack and opened it, eyes travelling from left to right at high speed.

Integra huffed, and half of the next cloud came out through her nostrils. "As do you. What better way to see what a man is made of than putting him into mortal danger?" She felt deliciously cunning. It wasn't often that she had an opportunity to contrive a scheme so underhanded; most strategy against Midians called for more straightforward measures, like, for example, '_send in Alucard_'.

Walter let the file down and surveyed her, one eye bare, the other hidden behind the glint of his monocle. "You are putting others into mortal danger by taking him along – do reconsider-"

"He is already in the know about the supernatural, Walter," Integra cut in, not really in the mood to be lectured. "He will be briefed and he will volunteer to go… and if he dies, he will be honoured like all who have laid their lives for the Queen and the Anglican Church."

x

Harry slammed the door of 'his' bedroom behind himself and hyperventilated.

Or, at least, he let a part of him panic, while the rest sat down on the edge of the bed, flung the folder Integra had given him onto the bedside, and tried to figure out what he should do.

He _had_ been on the verge of telling his hostess and fellow member of the Convention of Twelve the whole scope of magic as he knew it, but then he decided that she had quite enough to worry about without extremely volatile supernatural powers available to multiple persons of questionable sanity and intelligence added to the mix. That aside, the three dozen men that were to be deployed on this mission were muggles, and he wasn't about to break the Statute of Secrecy less than a week before he would start Auror training.

This required a plan. He had to think of a way to avoid Integra, Walter and – were there security cameras? He reached for the folder again and leafed through. Cameras installed in the object had been destroyed by the vampires – Midians, as the Hellsing Organisation called them. And what if Integra hadn't-

"A tantrum, Sir Harry?" a disembodied voice jeered when Harry kicked the bedside in frustration.

The air was still, but he had an impalpable feeling of currents shifting, and his reflexes propelled him to his feet. The folder slid off the bed and fell onto the floor, and Harry stood, empty-handed, face to face with Alucard's 'business' form.

He sighed and gestured to the artlessly spread briefing information. "I didn't sign up for this…"

Alucard lifted one hand, holding a wine-glass of what most certainly wasn't wine in the cradle of his huge, bare, long-nailed fingers. "When did ever mortals care about frivolities like free will?"

Bemused, Harry shrugged. Were they discussing people or politics? He didn't really give a damn about politics, and he wasn't very good with people – he never quite had a complete grasp on what was going on around him, and though he could be extraordinarily observant when he put effort in it, long-term he tended to remain oblivious to even obvious things.

Harry met the pair of yellow-spectacled eyes with the question of whether Alucard hated mortals on the tip of his tongue, but he never spoke it aloud. It was all there. Alucard displayed his worldview so clearly that a person had to be blind not to see and understand: it was there in the tilt of his head, in the angle of his brows, in the upturn of his nose and the lines around his mouth; it was in the challenging look and the mocking casualness with which he wielded his weapons. Every word he said, every wisdom he tried to impart, albeit soaked in blood, cried the same.

Even his terrifying, _demonic_ beauty he carried like a costume wasn't, as Harry had mistakenly believed, sheer vanity.

Alucard despised humankind, but he continued searching it for someone he could respect, possibly see as an equal – someone he had thought he had found in Wilhelmina Harker, who turned out to be such a disappointment to him that he was still, after century and a half, bitter about her… someone like Abraham Hellsing had probably been.

"You are training her…" Harry breathed with sudden understanding. Integra was a Countess in training – a mortal with the potential strength to become Count Dracula's equal… Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing… yes, he could see it. _Mina_ had been, even two years ago, so hard that he had felt like a child next to her.

The vampire met Harry's eyes in silence. He was reading, apparently, and a 'nothing left to tell' kind of awkwardness lingered between them.

Once released from the stare, Harry looked at his shoes and refused to raise his head, feeling stupid for having said such a thing aloud. For once the creature wasn't mocking him, wasn't laughing, and time grinded to a halt. Harry felt his cheeks heat with a flush of shame.

"The brightest of you maggots are so stupid!" the vampire growled.

Harry winced as if struck. His feet tried to carry him away, to hide his shame and his apparent stupidity, but a hand like a vice held him in place. He became painfully aware of his own fragility – he had always thought of himself as indelicate, but his arm was already bruising, and the vampire was being _gentle_, in vampiric terms, even if he did his best not to seem so in human.

"Your mortal lady is waiting for you," Harry breathed, inaudibly to human ears yet clearly to a vampire's. The hand released him.

With a flutter of thousands of wings, he remained alone in the room. Something in him, a kind of safe plinth he had been watching the world from, had been upturned, and he was left with the realisation that humans that were born as humans didn't stay humans. They ended up as werewolves and vampires and ghouls and biological weapons.

Death he had been aware of so keenly that it had become commonplace to him, but he could wake up tomorrow and be something he wasn't today.

Like he had woken up on his eleventh birthday and found that, all of sudden, he was a wizard.

x

Integra ducked into the Rolls-Royce and let Walter close the door. They were nigh on seamless, after six years of this tango, and she felt it much more acutely than she usually would due to the alien element of Harry's presence to her right side. He wore something that notably resembled the Hellsing uniform, and, like herself, had his ceremonial sabre on his belt, almost as if he knew how to carry it. She touched the tip of her gloved finger to the silver crucifix on her tie – blue, as usually – and smiled.

While today was not routine, it was still ordinary enough that she could fall back on a standard plan of operation, one with which she _and_ her men were familiar and comfortable. Sheer numbers were on their side; they had the element of surprise, superior weapons, sufficient experience and, should it prove necessary, the fall-back option of letting Alucard have a bit of unneeded exercise.

"Have you communicated with your friends, Sir Harry?" Walter asked into the low rumble of the engine. London rushed by outside the windows, at first reddish in the last vestiges of daylight, then orange and grey.

Integra glared at the civilians running up and down the streets, blithely unaware that they were offering their necks for someone to feed on.

Harry had been unusually tacit this afternoon – it was a different reaction than what she would have anticipated, although an acceptable one – but this time he managed to pull himself away from watching the opposite side of the same street and meet Walter's eye. The look he gave Integra's butler, though… It was detached, or perhaps guarded. The sentiment seemed strange to her; she hardly ever strayed from her five permissible emotions. It eliminated the need for philosophy and the vulnerability to depression, for neither of which she had time.

"Yes, I have," Harry said eventually, and went back to watching houses flicker by and disappear behind them.

He didn't ask anything. As Integra had set up the circumstances, he should have been demanding clarifications and reassurance, although the second to a lesser extent, perhaps, since he _had_ been knighted based on some kind of occult combat experience, and all signs pointed to him being potentially as dangerous as any Midian.

Still it was becoming increasingly obvious that at this point in time, Harry Potter was but a teenager exposed to the true dangers of the world and in possession of a few useful 'magical' tricks that had allowed him to survive this long.

"Are you anxious?" she asked. That would explain his saving the words.

Harry glanced at her and then looked back out of the window. "Apparently less than you are," he returned, with an edge of mocking that Integra recognised from her plentiful recourses with Alucard. She scrutinised the boy, but even in the meagre, intermittent light it was apparent that he was still fully human.

"Then you understand the plan?" she inquired. "You know what you are supposed to do and feel capable of accomplishing it? Keep in mind, there is more shame to failing than to admitting your doubts and adjusting the-"

"_Mina_," Harry cut in, and waited until Integra met his eyes. "I understand the objectives. _Keep in mind_, though, that you are in no position of authority over me."

x

Quite opposite from what Harry had told Integra, he _was_ anxious about the raid. It wasn't going to be half as dangerous as breaking into Gringotts and escaping on a dragon, but for once he wasn't feeling full of confidence. He knew he wouldn't die – Alucard would save Integra the paperwork, if nothing else – but there was a chance that he would allow a glimpse of the wizarding world to one of the few muggles whose bloodhound nature and lack of skepticism would drive them into sniffing out more.

Then there were the vampires. Harry had, upon meeting Alucard, realised that he didn't know the first thing about them (aside of what their diet consisted of, which seemed fairly non-negotiable). They should have studied vampires in sixth year. Snape, faced with the gaping holes in their knowledge left behind after their former teachers, had done his bloody best to prepare them for the war. Since Voldemort had never hinted on using any of what he considered 'subhuman' species to help him fight for pureblood supremacy, it stood to reason that vampires had been skipped.

The car rumbled to a halt behind of the barrier of two military trucks. Soldiers, covered toe to head in protective gear, climbed out and absently congregated in practiced formations. Harry saw who he thought, based on the gait, was Stephen, but otherwise they were truly uniform.

Integra climbed out onto the asphalt, accepted a pair of binoculars from Walter's hand and looked through them at the building on the other side of the trucks.

Without any idea of how, Harry became aware of Alucard's presence. There was no visible or audible sign, just a feeling, a brush of consciousness letting him know. A sort-of metaphysical 'hi, I'm here'. Harry had only ever encountered one vampire before Alucard (unfortunately, Sanguini hadn't been very _sanguine_ at all; he had been more like… _anemic_), so he couldn't begin to guess if this was normal behaviour for the species.

Then again, it hardly would be normal if they acted normal, right?

"The den has been abandoned," Integra said, with a frown dragging the corners of her lips downwards. "Still, the enemy wouldn't have been fast enough to leave the compound."

Harry, being familiar with Apparition and having seen Integra's resident undead utilising more impressive modes of transport, doubted that statement, but he was content to maintain his silence and let her deal with her problems.

"Commander?" One of the soldiers stepped out, crisply saluting. "Awaiting orders."

Harry would have continued to pay attention – this interaction was _interesting_ – but a flash somewhere high up distracted him. He didn't quite realise what has happened until afterwards: someone had sniped them – Integra or Walter or even _himself_. The bullet never reached its destination. A hellhound leapt out of midair, got hit, and imploded in a cloud of grey dust.

Integra didn't seem to have noticed. Her butler hissed, and elegantly manhandled the woman into a position where she would be shielded by the trucks.

x

"The infestation has grown faster than we computed, Commander," the Captain said.

"How much faster?" Integra asked, lifting the binoculars to check again. Damn ghouls for not showing up on thermo-vision. The things were inordinately tricky to anticipate. She couldn't see any lumbering shapes behind the unfinished glass walls of the lowest three floors and the skeleton of the upper part would be, probably, too complex and trap-ridden for the trash to navigate, but there was no telling how many of them were on the three underground floors.

"O'Brien estimates two hundred and fifty percent."

Integra's eyes widened behind the binoculars. That was a miscount of fatal proportions. Still, the den had to be eliminated today, or the Midians would flee. If worse came to worst, she would send in Alucard. And damn but it aggravated her how much she sometimes depended on him!

"Proceed with the plan," she ordered, "but if the situation gets out of control, pull back."

The Captain saluted and strode off to pass on the command.

Integra signed to the soldiers manning the third truck to ready the flame-throwers. It would still be some time before they would be needed, but she had learnt from her own mistakes that it was always better to be overprepared than underprepared.

She glanced at the hulking building one more time and then turned around. Walter was standing there, gloved and with microwires at the ready, intently watching the future battlefield. There was a familiarity in the sight and it made her feel that something was wrong.

It took her a while to realise what, and she felt a chill down her spine. "Where is Jonathan?"

x

Harry wasn't sure how it happened. One instance he was there, in relative safety, gazing up at the half-finished shopping and housing complex and trying to discern what was going on with the sniper, the next there was an attack aimed at him from behind, which he had managed to avoid only because it was magical in nature and he had had his senses fine-tuned by war-induced paranoia.

Alucard did not intervene – whether because he was having fun elsewhere, or because he was having fun watching Harry fight for his life – and Harry avoided death by bullet, by blade, by claws and by teeth only due to lightning fast sequence of Apparitions that carried him out of the way of each.

He had been so startled that he hadn't had time to think of counterattacking. Just escaping with his hide intact was enough for the moment.

"Strewth!" one of the beings growled. "It's the Vatican…"

Harry wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean, but then they came from both sides and he Apparated again, up onto the roof of the complex in hopes to get far enough away to have a chance to breathe and figure out what he was going to do. A blast of wind hit him into the face and pulled onto his clothes. He was glad he had worn the borrowed uniform (if transfigured to differentiate him from Hellsing forces) rather than his robe, but even so he was cold.

He didn't want to be dismissive of the abilities of Integra's operatives, but he doubted they would be of much help against foes this fast and intangible. He was iffy about Walter, though there was a grim certainty that Walter had what it took to be Integra's bodyguard. Alucard didn't give a hint that he was going to get involved-

How did this always happen to him?

And why were there at least two vampires, if the report and plans only mentioned one…? Why would Integra… oh yes, it made sense.

Harry bit his lip. It was like this game of theirs, except a step-up, for Integra had blithely put his life on the line. He had expected tests, but not a betrayal.

Bile rose in his throat and he decisively gulped it down. He had no time to solve this right now, but he was still disappointed, and _angry_, not so much at Integra who had probably never had a real friend in her life and so would not know what she'd thrown away, but at himself because he had actually believed that he had found someone who could empathise with him.

He had to remain focused on the present, though. This was war. And he – Harry thought cynically – _understood_ war.

Then they were there. They were far from ordinary. Wearing clothes that even Harry knew had been out of fashion for decades, though unstained, they must have stood out everywhere they went. _He_ was about thirty, blonde and – obviously even at first sight – vicious; _she_ had Weasley-red hair, and they both stared at him with glowing crimson eyes.

"Doesn't look like a priest to me," the female said. "Seems young."

"A Regenerator would," the male argued.

"I'm not a priest," Harry said.

"A Vatican maggot wouldn't deny he was one," the female mused, walking closer. Her wide skirts flapped in the wind. "They're insane about serving their _God_."

Harry would have pointed out that he didn't much believe in a god, any god, but the male vampire sneered, showing off a glint of pointy teeth, and crouched to spring.

"Easy to find out."

x

Alucard usually enjoyed watching bloodshed, but there was apparently something _fascinating_ about the bare structure of the upper floors of the complex, because he couldn't seem to look away.

Integra irritably shifted a stray strand of hair away from her face and moved closer to their improvised communications centre, listening to the battle going on in the impenetrable darkness of the construction site.

"No hostile reaction so far," the Captain was reporting. "Brady, take the left side, Fergusson and his team will go right. I've got the centre."

"Potts, stay at the rear," another voice said.

The silence was horrible. Integra was tensed for the first low growl, or a first scream, depending on whether they found the ghouls or the vampires first. She preferred the din of the battle, despite the occasional death of a soldier which she heard 'live', to this uncertainty.

"Do not split!" Walter spoke up suddenly. "Stay within sight of the other groups-"

"Impossible, sir," the Captain protested. "It's a maze down heeeaaaa…" his voice trailed off, and the pained whine was drowned out under a barrage of expletives. Shooting commenced.

Integra pursed her lips and reached into her jacket for a cigar.

x

Harry didn't believe he had ever focused as _hard_ as he did now.

These vampires were not like Alucard, who could have used him, controlled him, killed him in a split-second if he had so desired, but they were still ridiculously overpowered compared to wizard just out of Hogwarts. The fight was like a dance, except that each step landed yards away from the previous one, and Apparition after Apparition after Apparition carried him out of the way of a strike or a lunge or a shot. Each of his enemies had an automatic handgun, two sets of claws and an array of teeth, aside from their brute strength. They could have crushed his skull between their fingers and, indeed, tried to.

He let out a blast of nonverbal _Lumos Solem_ (no time for incantations between jumps), and it did hurt at least one of them, but not enough. He got a second's breather when he unexpectedly moved to a lower floor, but then they were back, ducking below and leaping over his fireball.

It was sheer luck – and reflex – that he used _Sectumsempra_ when one got too damn close and Harry panicked for a millisecond. Cut practically in half (Harry had not controlled his power output), the female vampire splashed blood of her victims all over the floor. It looked like she was going to regenerate-

Harry Apparated out of the way of a duo of bullets, but went right back in and a second _Sectumsempra_ detached the female's head. She turned to dust.

x

"_Goddamnit_!" Integra yelled, too furious to control her language. God would forgive her, surely, if only she completed the mission-

"We are sustaining heavy losses, Sir Integra," Walter said serenely, gazing at the building through the windshield of the truck. Fat lot of good his statement did, though; Integra had been perfectly aware of that, and the distinct 'I told you so' quality only pissed her off worse.

It was a part of Walter's job to 'tell her so', and he had _not_. He had protested the inclusion of the little Knight, but so far Harry had not entered into the battle – she had a strong suspicion that he had managed to hide in some dark corner – and therefore it was spurious of Walter to suggest that he had warned her.

"Go," she told to the two men standing at the ready with the first flamethrower. The ghouls were already dead anyway, and steadily advancing to upper floors.

Someone chuckled, and that must have been what broke the camel's back, because in the next instance, Integra slammed her palm into the shell of the truck and started shouting: "Stop snickering like a retard and make yourself useful! I could just have you locked in the cellar for the next twenty years! Go clean out the vermin!"

x

Harry was so high on adrenaline, that he wasn't really thinking, just doing whatever his instincts told him.

"You creeping Jesus-"

The rage slowed the vampire down, and Harry had enough time to move into offensive for a brief but crucial moment. He didn't get a direct hit, and the _Ssssectumsssempra_ started feeling like oil on his tongue, dark and flowing and slimy.

"_Ssserpensssortia_…" came out in parseltongue. It had the same oily feeling to it, and Harry resolved not to use it again, but then it wasn't necessary anymore. The snake he had summoned was huge and coiled to attack. The vampire dodged the fangs, but he couldn't avoid yards of whip-like body and that was as much distraction as Harry needed to pick up the female's gun, aim and pull the trigger.

The vampire's skull burst. There was a brief hesitation, but then the body gave and fell apart into slowly-descending particles.

"_Evanesco_," Harry said.

Nothing happened.

He threw the gun away, aimed his wand at the serpent that was beginning to eye him and reiterated: "_Evanesco_." The creature vanished.

Disoriented and hurting like he hadn't been since the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry staggered toward the hole in the floor (future elevator shaft), the same direction from which the shouting and low grumbles were coming.

There was a battle going on downstairs. He had almost forgotten. A line of Hellsing soldiers was backing away from an advancing mass of lumbering Inferi-like creatures. Ghouls, according to the file. Drained of blood by a vampire. Unsalvageable, but spreading a devastating plague…

A bright orange flame blew up, scalding Harry's retinas. He cancelled the Sticking Charm on his glasses and pulled them off to clean them. When he put them on again, there was a new fighter standing between the two sides and hysterically laughing. Dressed in clinging black leather that glinted orange in the firelight, and with an insanely long wave of white hair, Harry nevertheless recognised Alucard easily.

The previously _orderly_ fight degenerated into a melee.

Alucard moved so fast that to a human eye he was blurred, but even that was undoubtedly a self-imposed limitation in acquiesce to his chosen shape. The soldiers lifted their machine guns and started firing into the mass. Bits of what was probably rotting flesh flew every which way, and Harry, belatedly, became aware of the stench.

Coming down from his adrenaline trip, he saw as one of the Inferi somehow _bit through_ the sleeve of a protective overall and the soldier inside it screamed.

Alucard, in a flash, stood in front of the infected man, grabbed him, and _ripped_ him apart like he was a piece of paper. A shower of blood painted the walls, the ceiling and the nearby combatants, and Harry stared at it for way too long, just trying to get over the by-the-way end of a man's life. It was necessary, yes, but it was swift and uncompromising and, worst of all, _indifferent_. Merlin, but Monsters played hardball.

He despised it with his entire being, but at the same time, detachedly, admired the ability to be so inhumanly efficient.

With a shudder of rationality returning and stomach churning, Harry Apparated back to Integra's Rolls-Royce.

x

"Commander!" Sergeant Feretti, in a uniform covered with soot and ashes, came up and saluted.

Integra bade him to speak.

"The crew has isolated the plague. They're sterilising the place." He pointed at the building. The basement glass-walls were flickering dark red, reflecting the flames behind them. As with most supernatural trash, the surest way of disposing of the virus was burning it out.

"Continue-"

"Commander!" another Sergeant – Potts – ran up to Integra, and she momentarily had to split her attention between Feretti saluting and leaving to fulfill the order she had given and Potts yelling: "The Captain has entered the madness stage, Ma'am! He's fighting us! Lieutenant Steadler and his unit have him isolated in one of the garages, but he's lost the ability to communicate and… Ma'am, I'm afraid we'll have to…"

"Terminate him!" Integra filled in, phrasing it as an order. This was the deal: she had to make decisions quickly and correctly. There was no room for partial solutions, and if she erred, it had to be on the side of caution.

"Y-yes, Ma'am!" Potts said, going more ashen than he had been made by the light of reflectors. He stumbled a little on his way back to the den, and Integra briefly wondered if he had been the Captain's friend. She had no idea.

"Walter?" she called.

There was no response, so she went to get Harry and take him back to the cars, but then she remembered that Harry had disappeared somewhere, and Integra had no patience left for little idiots who couldn't stay where they were put. He would not get to the quarantined parts through the cordons of her people, and other than that she didn't have time or energy to follow his movements.

x

Harry's feet hit the driveway and he stumbled a bit. Integra's car had been abandoned where it stood, by the curb. He looked around, searching for the girl – there she was, platinum hair bright and unmistakable. He went to join her.

A shout of 'Master!' – or a mental wave – went through Harry's brain like knife through butter. He spun.

The vampire was a male who looked no older than fifteen, poised to jump on Integra's unprotected back while she was focused on methodically shooting the last few ghouls on the other side of the chain-link fence of the building site.

Harry didn't think about what he was doing – the sabre was suddenly in his hand and it was hardly different from Gryffindor's sword. He swung at the same time as the vampire leapt-

He had not expected the blade to be useful in combat, to be heavy and sharp. He had thought it a decoration, but it split the undead neatly into two pieces that landed as a shower of dust on the pavement around Alucard's boots.

"You're late," Harry said breathlessly, sticking the sabre back into the sheath (there was Harry's silver lining – no necessity to clean the blade of bodily fluids). Truthfully, Alucard wasn't late, not really, just cutting it so close that it would have been inconceivable to a human that he would still have time enough to stand between Integra and the attacker. He moved faster than Harry could think.

Integra glanced over her shoulder and assessed the scene: Harry, with empty hands, was standing a couple of yards from Alucard as his gleeful best. She drew her conclusions and, for possibly the first time in his life, Harry decided not to speak up for himself. He didn't mind being thought useless if it meant people would stop asking him to save them.

The shooting stopped and the soldiers exited the building. Integra went to receive the preliminary reports and to direct the clean-up crew.

"I could tell her the truth," Alucard said, actually formulating a question somewhere in between the nonexistent lines of that statement, as though he couldn't have read any and all answers straight from Harry's mind.

"And why would you?" Harry countered. "She doesn't need me. Let her let me go."

"What if _I_ don't want to let you go?"

Harry didn't have a response to that. He looked around for inspiration, anything to pull him away from having to answer, because nothing he could think of and say would matter to the vampire. He found the yearned-for distraction in the form of Integra, who, having discharged the men, stalked back over to them, hands balled in fists and so angry that Harry wished she had something to hit and get it out of her system before he had to talk to her.

"Only _one_ of the vampires? Where are the others?" she barked.

x

"What others? The report said there was only one…?" Harry stared at her with his green – _innocent_ – eyes and brows furrowed in incomprehension.

Integra paused. She couldn't – physically couldn't – say: 'yes, but your copy of the report had been doctored'. The boy had come to her with hopes of friendship and she had used him as a test subject – she should be feeling remorseful. Instead, she was mostly indifferent, and slightly disappointed, but she had believed 'Jonathan' too weak since the beginning so it didn't come as a surprise.

She couldn't, for the life of her, understand why he was convinced that the world around him worked differently than around everyone else… and why, in the name of God, the world conformed to that conviction. There should have been two more vampires in that building.

"I think I'll be happy to see my bed. This has been way too much excitement," Harry muttered, liberating her of the obligation of answering.

She rounded on Alucard. "Where are the others?"

"There are no more undead in the area, Master. Your men destroyed them all," her servant informed her, staring upwards at the overcast sky that defied the weather forecast. It was far from the Full Moon, so he had no excuse to call the night beautiful, but otherwise he probably would have tried. Then he rolled his head to the side and smirked. "One day you shall be confident enough in them to spend the battle in safety."

x

Three vampires. _Three_. And not melancholy weaklings like the ones Harry had been familiar with, but true Midians, so powerful that they would have killed him like nothing if they had been more familiar with the human kind of magic. As it stood, it was the element of surprise that had allowed him to come out of the experience whole.

Integra had known. She had done it deliberately.

This wasn't a game anymore.

Integra had lied to him and used him, made him feel like he was a guinea pig participating in an unethical experiment. There was little that could make Harry truly enraged. He got angry at a lot of things, at injustice, carelessness and ignorance, at persecution and discrimination and bigotry… the list was long. But the kind of white-hot fury that scalded his veins now only ever emerged when someone had grievously harmed Harry's loved ones.

This was the first time he had ever felt it because he, himself, had been so hurt.

x

The fires were dying down, and now that the danger had passed, the crisis had been averted, Integra felt like she could fall asleep on her feet. She desperately needed to get some rest before she would start on the mountain of condolences. She _abhorred_ writing condolences, for reasons she refused to contemplate.

She accepted the Lieutenant's salute and sent him off to recuperate. The raid was a resounding failure: the so-called Knight had turned out to be as useless in a combat situation as he looked, and the Captain had been infected, so the chain of command would be moving again, generating a stack of forms (in addition to other paperwork) for her to read and sign.

Someone somewhere was quite intent on making sure she got no chance to sleep in. She wished there was a weekend for people like her.

As if she didn't have enough trouble to contend with, Harry shouted: "Keep your teeth to yourself!"

He was still standing where she had left him, but he had moved away from Alucard. There was an expanse of cracked pavement between them, and Harry was poised for fight, with his hair standing on ends as if he had stuck his fingers into a socket.

Integra shivered. She looked for Walter, who was much better at mediating than her own hotheaded self, but Walter was off, doing another of the thousand thankless tasks.

Alucard spun out of the way of a geyser of hot water that spurted out of a crack in the pavement and Harry-

Harry was holding a little blue flame in his palm.

"You are not nearly desperate enough to open a gas line under our feet, Sir Harry," Alucard said with perfect confidence. It didn't make Integra feel more at ease: she didn't believe in the rationality of angry people, and Harry was looking supremely angry – beyond reason, one might say.

"There are levels of evil I have not yet sunk to," Harry growled, "but that doesn't mean I won't. People change. Some change into cadavers-" he glanced at the entrance to the basement, before glaring at Alucard again, "-some into Monsters."

"And which are you?" Alucard asked gleefully.

Harry's eyes strayed over to Integra; he let his hands down – snuffing the flame – and smiled, as though he had only pretended his anger. "I am just a guest in your world," he said. "A tourist."

Alucard howled with laughter, spread his arms like wings and walked off into the night. Integra considered calling him back and demanding a report, but she was ready to finish here and leave the site to the clean-up crew.

"You are correct," she told Harry, who seemed to be waiting for her to say something. "You are a guest. You would not do well here."

"And now you know it," Harry replied.


	5. Eating My Wings To Make Me Tame

A/N: It's been a while. I hope you are still interested. Nothing Like Harker is definitely not dead – as evidenced by the update below – and it still has a chapter or two to go. By the way, previous chapter's gone through a minor cosmetic edit.  
Let me know what you think. Cheers.  
Brynn

x

Chapter Five: Eating My Wings To Make Me Tame

x

Harry stumbled out of the car and blearily glared at the silhouette of the manor towering above him.

"You're exhausted," Integra gauged. She pulled off her glasses and rubbed the corners of her eyes. She was tired, too, but not allowing herself to succumb to it.

Harry wasn't as foolish as to believe he could do anything that would change her mind. He wasn't even certain he cared to. "Hmm…" he replied instead of 'so are you'.

Integra put her glasses back on and glared – it was surprisingly effective. "Go to bed, Harry. You can find the way on your own, I believe?"

Harry nodded (he didn't bother pointing out that he was hardly 'on his own' if the security cameras, guards, Walter and Alucard followed him nonstop) and moved forth. He was a tad wobbly, but no more than he would have been if he had drunk two glasses of wine. A wall to lead him along would have been a comfort, but he successfully crossed the empty expanse of ground.

"Good night…" he called over, kind of happy when the front door didn't shock him with high voltage upon contact, and, once he was in the corridor, added: "…or what's left of it." The nearby guard didn't move a muscle, just continued staring straight ahead.

This place was so eerie…

Someone had been in his room.

After the initial resentment, Harry realised that it had been a maid that had come to clean – most likely their standard modus operandi within the manor. He couldn't imagine Integra – the rhabdophobic Lady-Knight-Commander of a private army – picking up after herself.

He was, nevertheless, glad that he had brought no belongings with himself.

The closet door stood open, and inside Harry found a set of clothing that looked to be approximately his size, apparently procured by someone who had noticed that Harry had no luggage and wasn't aware of his ability to keep on Transfiguring and Scourgifying the robe he was wearing. Still, he couldn't deny that it was nice to just pull off his clothes, grab some clean pyjamas, and have a hot shower before climbing into a bed smelling of freshening.

x

The first thing Integra did once she entered her office was demand strong green tea.

As soon as the door closed behind Walter's back, she opened the uppermost drawer on the right side, relocated the gun on top of a stack of some useless administration and pulled out the fake bottom. To be truthful, she had no idea if Walter was aware of her stash, but it would have surprised her if he was and never said anything disapproving.

Alucard certainly knew.

She poured a neat line of the powder on a free patch of the desk, stuck one end of a straw into her left nostril and inhaled.

Then she quickly hid the evidence back under the fake bottom and the spare Beretta, wiped her nose and the desk, took off her glasses and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. What a night. What a cock-up. What a _fucking_ mess.

"You are not superhuman," Alucard offered his much unwanted opinion. He was lingering on the balcony, enjoying the red moon and the breeze that tugged on his melodramatic coat and unfathomable hair, and generally doing his best to, for a moment of breath-ripping irony, fit into the role of a gothic heroine. He almost managed, too – were it not for the dramatic glint of his prolonged canines and the red glow of his eyes.

She snorted – and wiped her dripping nose again. The numbness was setting in, but so was the stimulating effect.

Alucard abandoned his perch on the railing and came inside, wearing the blood-sated benevolence like an absurd carnival mask. "No matter how much you try to fit in with the Monsters, you are not one of us, Integra."

"_Fuck you with a barbed knife_!" she bellowed, slamming her fists into the desktop. It almost made her feel better about tonight's unnecessary, monumental fuck-up.

"So very Hellsing of you, Master!" Alucard conceded, adding obscene hip-swinging to his lazy saunter.

Walter saved her from further attack of animalism by ghosting into the room and depositing the tea-tray in between Integra's elbow and the pesky stack of forms. He automatically reached into his vest-pocket for a lighter, and then briefly became concerned when he realised Integra wasn't presently chewing on the end of an unlit cigar.

Integra grabbed the cup and drained it, scalding her tongue. Whatever. The night couldn't get much worse.

She tried to imagine what her Father would have done in her place… And that wasn't such a bad idea at all. In fact, she should have thought of it much sooner. If she assumed that there was an entire community of people familiar with the supernatural, this wouldn't have been the first instance when the Hellsing Organisation encountered them. Logically, there would reports and notes, probably also some profiles, covert intelligence and instructions for Integra, if only she could figure out where Father would have hidden them.

As she did with every idea she couldn't quite transform into a set of orders, she turned to Walter. "I need someone to go through the archives and find if the Hellsing Organisation ever encountered someone like Sir Harry Potter. I want a comprehensive report. Yesterday."

She didn't need to look at either Walter or Alucard to know that yesterday was when she should have demanded that report, _before_ she had started playing with the box of matches that was her guest. She wondered how many mistakes she was being allowed to make with the excuse that she had to make them to learn from them. That Alucard didn't show initiative in saving men's lives surprised no one.

That Walter had said nothing beyond 'please, reconsider' irked her. She had thought she had the situation firmly in control. The problem hadn't so much been the inclusion of Jonathan as the errors in apprehending the size of the enemy forces. She had been present for reconnaissance herself. She had supervised all the preparations. This was indisputably her fault, but she couldn't tell where she'd made it.

Had she concentrated on Harry too much and missed a crucial fact?

Or… Could it be that Walter had missed it, too? Was that the reason why he hadn't warned her?

Voila, life lesson number umpteen: _you can't trust anyone to have all the right answers, not even Walter_. And fuck, that was so scary she wanted to throw up.

Walter was giving her the worried look again and Alucard was valiantly limiting his explosion of mirth to simple laughter, no cackling. Integra felt sick and weak, and the cocaine mixed in with her emotions probably wasn't helping, but the sharp artificial light was inordinately forgiving and she knew she could play off the turmoil inside her head as simple exhaustion. She did it fairly regularly.

"Sir-"

"Alucard, is Potter a threat to the Hellsing Organisation at all?" Integra cut in. If Walter had anything important to say, he would say it when she had time to listen. Right now she needed to know if she was concentrating on the wrong issue.

"Possibly," Alucard said, playing with a string that might or might not originally had been a part of someone's internal organ, like a huge, sadistic, shape-shifting kitten. "He was not before you informed him that you wanted to see him die a grisly, bloody death fighting a superior enemy."

Integra let out a heavy breath, rested her elbows on the desk and leaned her forehead against her laced fingers. So Harry _did_ know that she had lied to him to observe his reaction. What he apparently didn't know, unless Alucard was being unexpectedly metaphorical, was that Integra didn't specifically want Harry to die. Of course, it was very human to consider that difference insignificant. Integra herself wasn't comfortable with the idea of her own expendability.

"I'm not going to apologise," she informed her two retainers.

"Your family did make arrogance into an art form, Sir Integra," Walter replied. He didn't comment on the ever-present example of Alucard, rather pointed out that: "In a Knight of the Round Table, it is a necessary trait."

That was hardly a viable advice on how she was to diffuse the threat to her Organisation that had so handily created.

"Is Potter such a failure then, because he is not arrogant enough?" she inquired. Certainly, in every leader a measure of arrogance was to be expected. No soldier would follow her if she appeared to be doubting her own leadership, and the Order of Twelve was comprised of Knights expected to lead their organisations.

Admittedly, as far as she knew, Harry didn't have an organisation, and he had only been a leader of an informal group of adolescents, and he had allegedly faced Tom Riddle on his own, with no support whatsoever. How the Hell was he even alive?

"If you allow me an observation," Walter spoke, "Sir Harry is, in fact, quite arrogant. He is far from stupid and has unfathomable power at his disposal, which predisposes him to arrogance."

"He is not afraid of me," Alucard added in a supremely amused tone.

Integra did not acknowledge his quip: she could name several idiotically arrogant people (Shelby Penwood, Hugh Irons, Robert Walsh…) who were likely to piss themselves if Alucard just grinned in their direction. Arrogance implied neither courage, nor cowardice.

From what Integra had observed, Harry possessed no abundance of fighting spirit, but he strongly disapproved of killing and had a touch of Hero complex. He should have been at least asking to be allowed to go and help her soldiers as soon as he had heard they were dying, but instead he had been… out of sight. Out of earshot, too, probably. He had offered no explanation, might not have been aware of the losses Hellsing had sustained, and by the end of the battle had gotten into a relatively mild argument with Alucard.

Integra looked at the vampire with an unvoiced question.

He grinned, unrepentant and unrelenting. Fuck him. With a barbed knife.

"It is down to a simple lack of skill, then," she extrapolated, hoping that it would move Alucard to say something. If Harry was truly unskilled, if his mythical confrontation with Riddle had been a fabrication, or merely an instance of improbable luck, Alucard would have outright dismissed him as a threat to Hellsing… wouldn't he?

"That is a dangerous assumption, Sir Integra," Walter warned her, wasting his effort. "It might be that he simply did not wish to be included in the battle."

"He is not a coward," Integra protested. Here Alucard's juvenile statement became relevant. Harry either was insanely difficult to frighten, or simply insane. Had he been insane, Alucard would have seen it in his mind and dismissed him as unworthy – the only attention Alucard gave to the insane was the few seconds during which he stole their lifeblood.

"He is, however, a very private person," Walter suggested.

"He is a child."

Alucard burst into laughter, deep and annoying, and so hard that the floor trembled and the chandelier overhead swung from side to side. Windowpanes rattled and particles of dust dislodged from the furniture danced in the sharp electric light. Outside the insects and rodents would have been fleeing for their little lives.

Integra rolled her eyes, tried to bite down on her cigar, and realised she wasn't chewing any. Her teeth clacked.

"Sir Integra," Walter said, strained as if he were fighting to keep a straight face, "you have been leading the Royal Order of Protestant Knights since you were thirteen years old."

She had. Still, she was one of a kind. If anyone could be like a Hellsing, there would have been no reason for her ordeal. More importantly, the Queen would have assigned the Mission to the one most capable of carrying it out, and the fact that it had been a thirteen-year-old girl was telling.

"I am unconvinced," she said, crushing the butt of the previous cigar between her fingers and the ashtray. "I invite you to believe what you would, Walter, but in this instance I think the Queen is making a publicity stunt for the community of 'magic'-users."

If it were up to her, she would gather her army, hire a few mercenary groups, go raze the 'witches' to the ground and burn them, for a good measure.

"Thou shall not suffer a witch to live…" she muttered.

"How fortunate for you that all your forefathers are dead, Miss Hellsing," Alucard said, mockingly scrutinising the back of his white-gloved hand. "How sad for me, though – patricide is, often, quite the spectacle."

x

5th of June 1999

x

Harry woke from a dream where he had adamantly refused to pray to Allah and was being dragged by his hair by a man who stank of horses and sweat, and the dry dirt and little sharp stones ripped the skin of his palms to ribbons.

He curled up in the soft, freshening-scented bed and tried to summon the strength to get over to the bathroom and wash up. Beyond that, he wanted to know if it was his subconscious that tortured him this way or if Alucard was playing with him.

"That was your buried masochism, Sir Harry," a mildly amused voice informed him. "I have been preoccupied watching my Master poison her body with recreational drugs."

A multitude of shiny crimson eyes blinked into existence on the background of the darkened canopy. They had no lashes and no lids, just bloodless whites in contrast with burning red irises and pinprick-sized pupils on the background of amorphous yet alive – no, not alive, _sentient_ blackness.

Harry froze, staring at one of those floating eyeballs; his eyes strayed to another and another, constantly moving, unable to hold gaze yet too shocked to even consider being afraid of meeting it. What little unreliable information he had ever learnt about vampires hadn't even hinted on anything past the basic shape-shifting and some paltry telepathy-like abilities. He had known Alucard was something else from the get-go, but now he was realising that he hadn't even scratched the surface of the depth of that difference.

And, consequently, had been overconfident in believing he could get out of the Hellsing Manor at any time.

A nonverbal Tempus informed Harry that it was almost quarter past three. Too early to think. He would have gone for a Pepper-up Potion, if he had access to any. He thought about attempting to conjure some tea, but decided that if he felt too shaky to go to the bathroom, attempting anything more complicated than a Summoning Spell would be too hazardous.

"You're not concerned for her?" Harry inquired, closing his eyes. He saw a flash of advancing marble floor and then experienced an echo of pain just like he had felt when Draco had stomped on his face. The crack of a broken nose. A spatter of blood. Bellowing voices.

He opened his eyes, mutely begging Alucard to stop it.

However, either Alucard truly wasn't the perpetrator, or he was ignoring Harry. His voice replied: "She has been trained for this since infancy."

"That doesn't really answer the question," Harry mumbled, hugging himself and squeezing his upper arms in his bloodless fingers as hard as he could. Even this pain, with an apprehensible source and concurrent, seemed surreal, and Harry still didn't understand why or how, because Alucard's statement didn't answer either of the questions.

"Shall I placate you with an anecdote about socks as a gift of preference, or will you accept that I will not answer?"

Shadows slithered over the pillows and blankets and burrowed beneath them, filling the places between Harry's body and the bedding. He couldn't feel them – they were intangible – but the mere knowledge that they were there finally spurred him to crawl out and go to the bathroom.

He ambled over and lit the small lamp over the mirror. Even so the glow felt too sharp to his eyes for a minute. Cool water on his face made him feel marginally better and so did, to his surprise, the sound of it hitting the porcelain sink and continuing, gurgling, down the drain. It was civilisation – almost like safety. Smelled like soap.

Harry snorted at his foolishness, turned off the water and went back to the bedroom, leaving the light on and the door open. It didn't really illuminate the space, but it allowed him to pick up greyish silhouettes of the objects, if indistinctly due to his myopia. His glasses were resting, as far as he was aware, on the bedside. They were secondary to his wand (with which he still, a year after the end of the war, slept).

"I'm bugging you, am I not?" Harry asked, sitting on the side of the bed. He let himself fall backwards, perpendicularly across the mattress, squinting upwards at the many, many eyes. Like stars on a darkened sky. Some stars were red, weren't they? Red dwarfs. "You're just so different – I'm like a nosy little kid, right? I'm sorry. I'll go soon." He felt like one of his stupid, pushy fans. Alucard fascinated him. "You'll be rid of me tomorrow, anyway."

Alucard made a little sound of surprise and a part of him focused into an anthropomorphic shape by the nearest bedpost. The eyes, notably, continued gazing down from the canopy. Alucard spoke, or pretended to speak, through the mouth of the human-like figure into which he had coalesced: "That is the first time someone wasted air in apologising to me since… I died."

"Now you're just making fun of me," Harry grumbled. "I felt you deserved the apology." Similarly, he felt he often deserved an apology from dozens of people who demanded things of him but never bothered to stop and acknowledge that he was an actual person under the Boy Who Lived personage.

Just like that, he was certain, there was more to Alucard than just the No Life King. He had already glimpsed a bit of personality when he had realised how the vampire felt about humankind in general and why he didn't mind being enslaved by Integra Hellsing, but he had learnt much, much more – much too much, if the nightmares were a sign of how his subconscious reacted to the knowledge – reading Abraham Hellsing's book.

"I have met a vampire, once," Harry said, "but he was… weak. Comparing him to you seems, somehow, _sacrilegious_."

He listened to Alucard's quiet, feigned footsteps, to the soft clicking of his heels where he crossed the carpet to the bare patch of tile. There was rustle of cloth, too, suddenly replaced by loud creaking of leather. No sound of breathing, though. Harry revelled in the tranquility.

"God is not too fond of wolves in his flock," Alucard remarked. His voice was deep, with a slight rasp. He spoke Queen's English. He might have been born and raised in Oxford. "He does not excuse me because I do my evil in the service of his servant."

"I wasn't raised to believe in God," Harry replied. His voice, higher and with a mixture of accents picked up in Surrey and at Hogwarts, sounded to himself unrefined in comparison. Moreover, he had never been led to religion or faith. Life on edge had taught him to believe in himself first and foremost. "The only guidelines I have to follow are given by my conscience."

"And your conscience tells you I am a _good_… _man_?" Alucard was quietly laughing, but Harry refused to be ashamed for his feelings. He had embarrassed himself often enough in front of the vampire already, and if this conversation was going to evolve the way he anticipated it would, there were going to be more blush-worthy instances in his near future.

"It tells me," he replied with honesty that was his cripplingly effective fall-back option, "that it's not my place to pass judgment on you."

x

One of Walter's more annoying vices was his compulsion to shadow Integra wherever she moved. He was dead on his feet – otherwise he wouldn't have sat down – but even so he insisted on supervising her early morning administrative work.

She had just finished composing the last condolence letter for tonight, when the sound of heavy, running footsteps filtered into the office from the corridor.

Integra leaned back in her chair, fished out a well-deserved cigar and clenched her teeth around it.

The door burst open. Sweaty and pale Potts stood on the threshold. "I apologise for disturbing you, Commander-"

"What is it?" Integra sped up the process.

"It's Zeller, Sir," Potts replied, breathing heavily and not coming further into the room. "He had a tick, so the Doc tested him. He's positive. He's asking for you."

Integra adjusted her glasses, pulled out a lighter and lit her cigar herself, which would have shocked a great many people who lived under the impression that she needed Walter or some other poor victim to do it for her.

"I see," she said.

"Inte-"

"Not now, Walter," she barked. "Go to bed. If I need you, I'll call."

Walter undoubtedly gave her all manner of angry, offended and disapproving looks, but she had had it with all her so-designated advisors tonight. As was the true role of Hellsings, when everything's gone to Hell, they were standing there with the barrel of their silver-bullet-laden handgun aimed at the Demon. Right now it didn't matter whether Walter had or hadn't anticipated what would happen, or how good his advice had been; it only mattered that the mission had been a success and that the Commander mopped up her own shit.

Integra felt, all the way to the infirmary, as if she were floating. Some of the chains that were binding her to the ground had broken, and she could view her own position in the machine that was Her Majesty's kingdom with a brand new perspective: her power, her responsibility, and her licence to kill. A grim yet supremely amused smirk stretched her lips around the cigar as she entered the prison-like sickbay.

"Zeller!" she barked.

"H-here…" a soldier, still in full uniform sans the helmet and the boots, was strapped to the frame of the bed in the corner. His skin was already gaining the tell-tale greenish grey hue, even though the infected wound must have been miniscule for it to take this long to show.

Integra went over.

Potts fled. All things considered, he was probably going to wait outside. No one wanted to watch their comrades die.

Integra, with mild startle, found that she felt no grief or guilt. There was pity, certainly, and also slight disappointment, but those feelings were overwhelmed by duty.

She reached for her Beretta and pressed the muzzle to Zeller's forehead. His eyes, still mostly lucid, bore into hers.

"In the name of God," she spoke, and his lips formed the following words together with hers: "impure souls of the living dead shall be banished to eternal damnation."

Zeller, with drool oozing from the corner of his mouth, said: "Amen…"

Integra pulled the trigger.

x

Harry felt uncharacteristically removed from himself. Darkness had a way of turning rationality on its ear. Things made completely different sense in darkness than they did in daylight, and the most insidious part of this was that, even if he was aware of the effect, Harry truly couldn't tell which of his reasonings was the correct one: the one that urged him not to listen to the five-X level dangerous beast (which really didn't begin to describe the power and destructive potential of Alucard), or the one that kept convincing him that becoming a part of The Dark could be fun and give him a purpose he seemed to be sorely lacking?

He knew that he should resist the temptation, but presently it was very hard to remember why. And Alucard could be a truly fascinating conversationalist, when he decided he wanted to.

"But you enjoy it," Harry protested, now sitting up against the headboard, with his knees drawn up to his chest as a shield, because he was more than half-afraid that, any moment now, his body would demand to be moved into the mass of welcoming Darkness that was Alucard.

"No, I do not _enjoy_ battle," the vampire refuted. The multitude of eyes spread all over the bed and his temporarily human-shaped frame widened at the same time, and his voice lowered to frequency that made Harry's heart flutter. "I exist for the moment when their eyes widen, when they realise that even though they're still breathing, even though they're still pissing themselves with fear, they're already dead-"

"I don't believe ghouls feel fear," Harry protested. It took all his concentration to hang onto reason. He should have been running out of this room, demanding that someone save him from this creature, but he didn't want to. And he hoped – because it seemed to be the only thing left to him now that his common sense and sense of preservation had abandoned him – that Integra had not given her slave permission to harm him. Otherwise this was all a part of a hunt in which Harry was the prey, Alucard the predator, and conversation a substitute for the chase.

He wondered if he should be scared.

"Vermin only ever feels hunger," Alucard replied, probably in part to Harry's argument, in part to his thoughts.

"You love killing people – humans, mortals, whatever you call them," Harry said, feeling like they were playing charades on top of everything else. He was verbalising his impressions for Alucard's amusement, and Alucard egged him on with alternating appreciation and hilarity. "These missions, the 'clean-ups', as Integra calls them, it's just a chore to you. I get it. It's sick."

"But you do 'get it'," Alucard returned, chuckling.

"It doesn't mean I agree with it," Harry pointed out.

"At your age, _I_ wouldn't have agreed with me." The vampire was outright laughing now, while several fanged maws opened all over his amorphous mass and howled at the invisible moon.

Harry tightened his grip on his knees, shivering, goose-bumped all-over. According to Abraham Hellsing's book, at eighteen young Vlad Draculea, prince of Wallachia, had already sold his soul to the Devil. Harry knew little about history, and he might not have been able to find either Transylvania or Wallachia on a map (although he hoped he would have been able to locate Turkey), but Abraham's unfeeling, scientifically satisfied rendition of the mindless horror that was Alucard's mortal life had etched itself so deep into Harry's mind that he doubted he would ever be able to forget.

"Back then you lived for revenge," Harry knew, without having to ask, just like he never had to ask explanations about why young Tom Riddle wanted to strike out against muggles. "Revenge on the Turks, on your father who gave you to them, on your own people who benefitted… Yes, too much pain and too much power. Like Voldemort…" His simply voice faded out over the course of the rant. The 'like Voldemort' he only mouthed, choking on his inability to empathise.

Alucard touched him, tasting the despair, licking it off the skin of Harry's ankles and shoulders. He seemed gratified. "It has been said that the masters of torture are those who were tortured."

Harry found the touch of the vampire's feelers absurdly – or not so absurdly – arousing. He gave himself a light slap to shake off the cobwebs. "They killed something inside you long before you became… this." And then, because he thought it might interest Alucard or maybe garner an explanation, he said: "That's what I dream about."

Alucard gave him the kind of smile that on a human face might have been called patronising. He redistributed himself, with the human-shaped part towering over the comparatively tiny ball of Harry, and spoke: "Not the tens of thousands upon tens of thousands I've slaughtered? Not the rivers of blood and cries of suffering and prayers for death of those I impaled and left to slowly slide down the blunt tips of the stakes for days on end-"

"No," Harry yelped.

"You dream of rape. You feel the dirty claws holding me down. You imagine how I shamefully begged and whimpered into the unwashed bedding. How they pulled down my brae and ripped my fragile body open-"

"Please… stop…" Harry felt a spike of pain inside his skull: Alucard's anger, muted down, gentled to not cause Harry permanent damage.

"It hurts you to just think about," Alucard snarled.

It did. Harry sobbed. "Alucard…"

"You can't imagine it. Can't imagine surviving it."

"…no…" Harry mumbled, shaking his head in general denial.

"That's why you won't judge me."

Harry wiped his tears into the sleeve of his shirt and fumbled for a handkerchief, since his nose was starting to run, too. He felt like he should be ashamed for falling apart in front of Alucard about something that had happened a very long time ago, and to the vampire rather than to himself. Still, the prevalent feelings were an overwhelming emptiness inside and burning hatred for people who could do something that stupendously cruel to a child, and for all those who could just shrug and forget about it when they found out. He knew that martyrdom wasn't clever, or attractive, or admirable. He had already martyred himself once, and no one even bothered to remember; all they ever talked about was him killing Voldemort, not him volunteering to die, which had been incomparably harder.

It wasn't like he understood what Alucard – _Vlad_ – had been through, and he couldn't even begin to imagine, and that made him feel horribly insufficient. He was just glad that his acquaintance with today's Alucard preempted any pity he might have been inclined to feel for young Vlad.

"You're sick," Harry repeated weakly. "Broken. Can never heal. Wouldn't want to."

"I know that," Alucard said coldly.

Harry felt like he had walked a mile barefoot over hot coals, and was coming out on the other side, smoked and tired, but ultimately unburned. "Why are you doing this? Why are you listening to me? Being patient?"

"Your pain amuses me," the vampire replied.

It was somehow weak, Harry mused. He had been expecting something far more cutting, some kind of inventiveness in Alucard's cruelty. This feeble explanation made sense in a very generalised way, and it was not satisfying in the least.

"What do you want, Alucard?" he asked.

The vampire gave him a grin full of sharp, glinting teeth, and said: "Blood."

Then he disappeared, leaving Harry alone to pass the rest of the night falling asleep and waking up in cold sweat from vivid nightmares about utter helplessness and hurt and emasculation that left the creature no other choice but to become a monster, when the option of becoming a man had been ripped away.

When the dawn came and Harry took in panicked gulps of cold air of the new, grey day, he knew, without a doubt, that there was one intrinsic thing he and Alucard had in common: they survived.

x

It was when the maid – Integra didn't actually remember their names – brought in her breakfast when Integra realised that she had had nigh on five hour undisturbed by male presence and she had actually _gotten work done_.

All the condolences and dismissal notes and directions to issue a draft were signed and in the outbox, waiting to be delivered. The requisition notes were ready. Even the payment records for June were completed. Integra was actually ahead on her paperwork, which hadn't happened to her since 1995 (just because she had been young and impressionable enough to let herself be bullied into doing her paperwork on time – it wasn't as if anybody expected it).

Also, she had had time enough to peruse the reports and came to a startling realisation: the den they had attacked had been supported by another group of Midians. This other group now undoubtedly had conclusive data on Hellsing Organisation – it would have made sense to observe their operation – and would therefore be doubly as dangerous in a direct confrontation. The positive side she could see was that she had deployed Alucard only in a strictly auxiliary function. Of course, being Alucard, he had gotten in his quota for ripping human-like beings apart, but even so it was highly improbable that this new group could fathom the true extent of Alucard's competence.

She was quite busy extrapolating the size and structure of this new group, when her temporary refuge was invaded.

Mr Harry Potter, knighted by the order of Her Majesty, the Queen, knocked politely, waited to be invited inside, and only after Integra admitted him came in, furtively staring at the walls as if they held the secrets of the universe.

"Have you slept at all?" he asked on his way over to Integra's desk, in his mock-up uniform and with his ceremonial sabre, which he seemed to have adopted as a part of his ensemble since yesterday.

Integra might have felt like she was going to sprout roots and forever grow into her big bulky and in the last few hours increasingly uncomfortable chair, but it was none of Potter's business. She chalked the question up to either simple inquisitiveness or a peculiar attempt on small-talk, and countered: "What do you want?"

Her curtness seemed to offend the boy. He stood straighter, not that it made the shadows beneath his eyes any less stark. Apparently, his foray into the real world last night had exhausted him, or gave him nightmares, the poor thing.

Integra gripped her pen – way too expensive for its function, but someone at requisition probably thought they could so underhandedly garner her attention – and looked at Potter's face. Together with the stiff way he was holding himself, it showed a negative reaction to her presence that hadn't been observable before.

He _had_ seen her shoot out ghouls. That might have affected his opinion of her. However, Integra didn't owe him anything, materially _or_ morally. She had acted correctly from her position, and if the results weren't getting an A plus for societal niceties, there was no reason for her to lose her sleep – If she was getting any. Which she wasn't, lately.

"Go on, Sir Harry," she said, adopting Walter's – and Alucard's – designation for him. She wouldn't call him Jonathan, because that was a shortcut to blindsiding herself, but otherwise the address didn't matter. And it was nice to have these things figured out, she mused. Nothing like having to shoot her man's brains out on an early morning to give life that much-needed clarity.

The boy gave her a considering stare and then shrugged. "I came to inform you that my time here is limited, so if you wanted to interrogate me some more, you should get on with it."

Integra blinked and pretended to give her attention to the subpoena in front of her. No sleep did slow down the thinking process. Now she knew for sure that Potter had been aware of the particulars of his situation, possibly ever since he entered the manor, and his lack of outward disagreement was due to his certainty that she and her men could not prevent him from leaving if he so decided. The traditional response in this situation would be to inform Potter that he 'wasn't a prisoner', but they both knew that was a lie and Integra felt no pressing need to give the boy more reasons for resentment.

The easiest solution would be to dispose of him, of course, but he had acquaintances competent with the occult that would undoubtedly come looking for him. It was not feasible. Her Majesty might miss Potter if he disappeared, and there was also the matter of Alucard's odd game of cat and mouse. He didn't like it when someone took away his toys before he was through with them.

Now that he'd proved himself more-or-less unexploitable, Integra wanted Potter simply out of the way if he wasn't a legitimate threat.

"What is your estimated time frame?" she asked.

She thought back to the reports from security. No mysterious spontaneously moving objects were mentioned, but it seemed that no monitoring technology survived longer than two hours with Potter in the room. He was on the move nearly constantly, with the exception of the night, which he spent cloistered in the guest room designated for him. The cameras and bugs invariably shorted out.

Integra considered the risk too high. She couldn't allow the apparent impossibility of keeping track of Potter to compromise the security of the Headquarters of the Hellsing Organisation. Unfortunately, in the absence of a viable alternative, she had been forced to implement her universal solution: send in Alucard.

Actually, that too might have explained Potter's lack of beauty sleep.

"I am going home tomorrow," the boy said, with countenance sharply reminiscent of his conduct during the Knighting. "My training starts on Monday, and I'm going to be well-rested and full of enthusiasm for it."

"Are you?" Integra's teeth ached just thinking about the amount of power and obscure knowledge in the hands of people who had neither the moral qualities nor the intelligence to make proper use of them. No man should hold either such power or such knowledge – as Tom Marvolo Riddle's case should have made more than clear.

Harry Potter could, from what she and her subordinates had observed, become invisible to sight and camera, summon and sentient creature from another plain, travel from one point in space to another in a negligible stretch of time, and he had already described a 'spell' that killed instantly. On the other hand, he was an eighteen year old boy, just out of school, with some meagre combat experience and a title bestowed upon him in a political power play between the crown and the pseudo-society of occultists… He could be a good, useful weapon, that she acknowledged, but letting him run unleashed was just inviting a catastrophe.

Angrily, she bit down on a chewed-up end of a pen. She so despised it when politics prevented her from doing her fucking job.

"I," she said with a contemptuous sneer, "have yet to see you muster more than a vague disinclination towards anything."

To her mild surprise and considerable frustration, he acknowledged the corner she had backed herself into with only a frown. Then he simply shrugged off her accusation. "You gave me nothing to be enthusiastic about. I came seeking friendship, perhaps even understanding…" He leaned forwards and rested his palms on her desk as Integra usually would. Even his round glasses glinted – reflecting sunlight – just like Integra's. "And all you've given me is suspicion, condescension and traps. Frankly, I'm sick of this."

"I'll inform Walter that we won't count on you for lunch tomorrow, then," she replied. That gave her enough time to catch up on _some_ rest, start thinking clearly, devise a strategy, implement it, and come up on top of this clusterfuck of a recon operation.

"Go and sleep, Mina," Potter had the gall to say to her. "You're _boring_ like this."

The much-abused pen cracked between Integra's teeth. She spat out the pieces and hoped that the blue ink didn't get onto anything, because Walter would be giving her disapproving looks otherwise, and she was just liable to respond with affirmative action.

"Nighty-night," Potter said, gave a jaunty little wave, and took his leave.

Integra watched him go. Before he left the office, she yelled after him: "Dinner, Sir Harry! Eight o'clock, sharp. No excuses."

He nodded and closed the door behind himself.

Integra huffed and leant back, groaning when her abused back protested the motion. She was on the verge of falling asleep where she was, and the prospect of a shower was more than daunting at the moment, but duty and responsibility made her grit her teeth and pull herself out of the chair and onto her feet.

She would make it to her bed.

She did, too. A short trip to the bathroom sapped the will to live from her and made her recall yet again one of the most obnoxious aspects of womanhood, and she crawled under the duvet Walter insisted on dressed in the same trousers she had worn through the recon operation, the mission itself, and the aftermath interlude in the infirmary.

"Don't _fucking_ touch me while I'm asleep," she growled. "That's an order."

Integra had once woken to Alucard licking the menstrual blood straight from the source, and it had taken her years to get over that trauma, no matter how much she liked to pretend her heritage made her immune to mental scars. She had a few mildly effective threats and the routine hands-off order instead of a 'goodnight' to protect her now, and she couldn't afford any more mistakes.

She was making too many already. The most outrageous one was her not taking the time to reevaluate the standard policy on detention – the Hellsing Organisation rarely invited 'guests' and it should have occurred to Integra that Harry Potter would not be subject to the usual human limitations. She had not expected to just how much of the manor and its grounds he would avail himself, either, as usually her and Walter's intimidation factor sufficed to make civilians keep their heads down around them.

Integra had been aware that Potter might not have been intimidated when he had smiled and politely conversed with Alucard. Still, what was there she could have done to prevent him from wandering? Tie him up? Post guards? _Ask nicely_?

Walter would find a way of dealing with it for a couple of hours, and then Integra was going to do her bloody job, find out how much of a threat Potter really was, get Alucard's ambiguous second opinion and finally remove the _tourist_ from her way so she could concentrate on her mission.

In the meantime, sleep.

x

Harry's plan to hide out among the soldiers until the Dinner of Doom failed epically.

He stood in front of the barred window of 'his' bedroom, thought of the three dees, scrunched up his nose in the effort, and promptly got lightheaded. He very nearly gave himself a concussion slamming the back of his head into the floor, but a conveniently stationed nimbus of dark grey pseudo-mass cushioned the fall.

Harry briefly became submerged in the _stuff_, and very quickly realised that he couldn't breathe. A part of him recognised the familiar state of dying. Another, more conscious, part of him protested. He didn't even have the time to try and struggle, before he was lifted by the back of his collar, a little like a disobedient cub, and a limb that might even have been a hand for all he knew deposited him back onto the bed from which he had fled earlier, and where Alucard obviously wanted him, to continue working on him.

He would have liked to know what Alucard's objective was in this endeavour. Not that he was scared – Alucard was just so far _beyond_ dangerous that being afraid of him was like being frightened that one day the Earth would plunge into the Sun and the humankind would die. Laughable. Consequently, that was the main reason why Harry laughed a lot around the vampire (not that 'vampire' actually described what Alucard was).

Mina probably thought he was either stupid, or plain insane. Harry was grimly aware, as the shadows of the pale sunlight shifted around the room with _un_life of their own, that he really couldn't argue with that assessment.

"Powerlessness is a 'been there, done that' deal for me, _Vlad_," Harry remarked. "Mine didn't hurt me nearly as much as yours hurt you, but I know what it's like to be helpless."

"The more pronounced should your fear be," the temporarily incorporeal Alucard replied, graciously ignoring all insinuations about the ability to be hurt of a being like him.

"Then maybe Mina's right and I'm cracked in the head," Harry admitted easily. He had seen too many people marked by war to put all that much stake into the ordinary standards for sanity. Some – Luna, Neville, himself – were a little worse off than others, but then, some of the things they had gone through made people throw up just hearing about them.

He shrugged.

"You humans! So prone to hatred and melancholia, to rage and bloodlust, so determined to fight and so easily swayed by any idea that presents you with the prospect of power, be it magic or God!"

Harry blinked. He guessed that non sequitur was probably Alucard ruffling through his memories and commenting on the Death Eaters or on Voldemort himself, but it might just as well have pertained to the traditionally irrational reception Harry had received from his public after the Battle of Hogwarts (coinage by Daily Prophet).

"You let yourself be fooled by your senses and manipulated by your sensibilities!"

Also, Harry mused, it could have been a comment upon Harry's self-delusion of relative importance that was the clay from which his feet were built. Or maybe it was about self-pity? Either way, it was liberating to know, absolutely and without a doubt, that Alucard's opinion in no way obligated him to anything.

Besides, Alucard's overdramatic derision went only so far in making Harry feel inferior for being human when Integra was every bit as flawed and quite a bit more damaged, and still Alucard willingly remained her servant.

Harry recalled blurting out the idea about Integra as Alucard's Countess, and felt a blush rising in his cheeks again. It was none of his business in the first place, and he felt incredibly stupid for sounding like he had discovered America while he should have been simply commenting on an obvious trend.

"Be embarrassed!" Alucard raised his voice, materialising eagerly leaning over to Harry, as if he were sniffing the blood that had risen in Harry's cheeks. "Embarrassment is another of the appealing human dispositions…"

Apart from embarrassed, Harry now felt cornered. Of course, Alucard was wholly unconcerned about such 'sensibilities' as respect for personal space or, Merlin forbid, _privacy_.

Alucard leaned in yet closer, brushing the heated skin of Harry's face with the tip of his nose, and spoke in a much calmer tone: "Be not ashamed though, Sir Harry, for observing and thinking."

"You would flatter me?" Harry was actually disappointed. It was not as if the vampire needed to resort to any extreme measures to get whatever it was he wanted, but the heavy-handedness was far cruder than Harry had expected. He would have thought that if Alucard tried to con him into something, he wouldn't notice.

Instead, here he was clenching his fists in irritation bordering on anger. Certainly, Alucard wanted Harry to undo the binding magic on him, and it would make sense for him to try and get into Harry's good books, but for a creature that could read thoughts this was beyond failure. Initially it made Harry feel like he was not worth the effort of moving a finger to Alucard… but that was so obviously not true that Harry automatically took the vampire's suggestion and continued thinking.

Alucard was sabotaging himself. That made no sense at all to Harry – he was floundering in the dark, without the slightest clue about his opponents' motivations (antagonistic and dismissive Integra, Walter that made all his instincts scream 'danger!', and Vlad the Impaler grinning at him from nary an inch of distance). This manor was lethal, but Harry's heart stubbornly refused to speed up.

"So many have tried, Alucard," Harry sighed, turning his back onto the vampire as a gesture of rejection (Alucard very well might have been _everywhere_ around, so it really didn't matted which direction he was facing). "I am, after all, the Boy Who Lived. What I am _not_ is your Fairy Godmother."

"You are a bit of lethal jailbait, Sir Harry."

Harry almost fell off the bed. Stunned, he opened his mouth to refute the claim, then to countermand with the fact that he was adult by his society's laws, but he shut up before he made more of an idiot of himself. Alucard was playing with him; that was all. Harry had a niggling feeling that the permeating sense of self-satisfaction was because the vampire did have to resort to exerting at least a minimal effort.

Alucard re-formed from the shadows in front of him, and Harry met his glowing crimson eyes – all eight of them.

"Sometimes I'm glad I've been taught not to take either insults or compliments too seriously," Harry told him.

"Let me change you," Alucard said.

And there it was – the answer Harry had been searching for. The illusion of kindness, the time expended on Harry, on confusing him and making him desire without allowing him to fully realise what it was he yearned for, all of that culminated in this offer.

Shadow-feelers palpated up Harry's calves, occasionally touching his knees, and he broke out in goose-bumps. Life as a vampire? Scratch that – _existence_ as a vampire? Was there anything at all not grim and bleak about it?

Even if wanting it had made perfect sense to him last night?

"I would pity you," Harry said, reaching forward to pull Alucard's curtain of hair to the side and free the sight of the right column of eyes, "except that there is nothing pitiable about you. I believe that you could return the sentiment. That would be much more appreciated."


	6. Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon

A/N: Sorry for the delay! One more chapter to go – I'm not promising a release date, though. Shockingly, life is happening. Ja ne!  
Brynn

x

Chapter Six: Never Tickle A Sleeping Dragon

x

"I do not feel pity, Sir Harry," Alucard said, blinking all eight eyes at once, "except for opportunities for heavy carnage lost. That gets the blood circulating."

It was such a predictable thing to say. Harry briefly considered just how likely it was that there was actual physical blood contained anywhere within the mass of Alucard, and then dismissed the thought as artless and inconsequential.

"My answer is final," Harry said, very certain that he didn't want to become a vampire.

Alucard's lung-ripping laughter sent telepathic waves of patronising amusement through Harry's skull. "Nothing is final, Sir Harry! Even Death has his ways of bending the rules, as you would know better than anyone!"

Harry shrugged. "Dumbledore said it was limbo. I wasn't lying to Integra. And if I was lied to and simply not clever enough to figure it out, then I was mislead and myself a victim of someone smarter who wished to prey on my stupidity-"

"Enough," Alucard hushed him almost gently. "Your Headmaster was dead, little Knight. Either you _were_ dead for a short time, or his presence in limbo was a product of your subconscious, in which case you were self-deluded and lying to my Master. I care not." His blood-red coat swirled into a glistening black leather overall, his never-ending hair danced in a nonexistent tornado, and a new eye, bigger, superimposed over the grotesque columns of little eyes, opened in the centre of his forehead.

Harry thought of pre-school kids playing with clay. Then it was kind of hard to be put off. He liked kids.

"I will not be a vampire," Harry repeated.

"You have a little too much life experience to be making definitive statements, Sir Harry," Alucard replied.

Harry thought, _que sera, sera_, which for some reason or other returned the vampire to his former, jocund mood.

"Since I'm pretty sure that you're not going to convince me anytime soon, and you know it," Harry said, "is there a reason why you remain in my company?"

Alucard grinned, showing off at the very least thirty-two sharp, pearly, glinting teeth. "Be my Fairy Godmother?"

Harry huffed and made another attempt to Apparate out of the room. It still didn't work, although this time the backlash wasn't quite as bad.

"My Master," Alucard said with a measure of disparaging fondness that Harry wouldn't have imagined was possible, "at first struggled with the idea of yourself out of the fairy-tale setting, robbed of your shiny armour and white steed-"

Harry didn't hear the rest of the soliloquy. He was too busy chuckling. He wished he were better at Occlumency, even if it would have been probably useless against Alucard's method of mind-reading. Still, Integra didn't appear to be nearly as susceptible to the moods Alucard projected.

"I am certain we could come to an accord, Sir Harry," Alucard said, leaning in close enough to practically taste Harry's breath. "There is so much I can give you. I only ask for one favour."

It must have been very rare for a creature such as the No Life King to ask, or even have a use for, a favour from a mortal. Harry, recalling the nightmares he had had last night, shuddered and stomped onto the desire to acquiesce that rose within him. He didn't know for sure, but he had a feeling he was being manipulated.

Well, okay. He did know about the manipulation, just wasn't clear on all the details (like the how and the wherefore).

"My Master sleeps," Alucard remarked, and meant 'I want it done now.'

Harry stood then, and faced the being that was the matter of nightmares for anyone sane, the fabric of everyday for Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, and knew in an instant what he was going to do. That was his saving grace. Had he spent any time thinking about it, Alucard would have read his intentions like a love-letter and laughed himself into a tizzy. As it was, Harry concentrated on the moral conundrum that acquiescing to Alucard's portrayed desire for freedom of the bonds of slavery meant to him.

Without protest, Harry let himself be led to the dungeons, to the dwelling of the Darkness and, wrapped in the protective cocoon of what he now knew to be the materia of Alucard, he stood in front of the bookstand.

Since he was aware of just how busy Integra had been in the past days, with her plots and scheming on top of her already highly irregular job, Harry wasn't at all surprised to see the room undisturbed. The book in front of him was just as he had left it, on the very same page, with the five-pointed star and the circumscriptions, and the arithmantic base of the ritual that had initially bound Vlad the Impaler into the indentured servitude to the Hellsing family.

"There is no wrong or right," Alucard remarked out of nowhere.

Up until that moment, Harry had not realised just how far he was sinking into the ambiguity that Voldemort had used to excuse the atrocities he committed. Alucard actually thought this was exciting – in the way an amusement park ride was exciting.

Harry was momentarily glad for his mortality, pronounced as it was in that instance. Living for centuries only invited centuries' worth of suffering, and that much traumatising experience was simply bound to turn a person into a raving psychopath. Never mind being raped as a kid, or seeing your family slaughtered in front of you, or going through an exorcism. People were so good at inventing ways to make one another suffer, and Harry suddenly felt way too young and way too disillusioned.

"There is only power and those too weak to seek it?" he asked mockingly. Then, solemnly, he implored: "There is no weakness in freely, of your own will, deciding that you don't want the power, Alucard."

Harry heard his heartbeat for the following seconds of silence, and then he raised his hand, fingers outstretched, closed his eyes and started the incantation.

x

Integra woke up to knocking on her door.

She was only half aware of it the first time it occurred, since her still-dreaming mind translated it as distant gunshots of an Iscariot swine picking off her soldiers (it was mainly a memory, and the timing of the knocks fit in perfectly). The knocking was repeated a while later, and by this time Integra was conscious enough to differentiate between dream, memory and reality, and aware enough to evaluate her disturbance as her butler.

"C'min!" she slurred, rolling over on the bed.

The buckle of her belt dug into the skin of her stomach, and she grimaced. Her forearms were, undoubtedly, a mass of fabric imprints. Her hair stank with perspiration. Her neck ached, and so did her shoulders.

She had the presence of mind to discard the blanket and start the search for her glasses as the door opened and Walter took a couple of steps in, in one hand holding a tray with a pitcher of coffee and a dainty cup.

"I apologise for waking you, Sir Integra," he said in a neutral tone.

Integra located the spectacles, put them on, and deciphered the numbers on the face of her alarm clock. Half past eleven. It was expected of her to… what? She blinked and tried to remember. She had shot one of her own soldiers. A gesture of mercy to a man infected by the worst disease known to humankind – an act of which she was rightly proud. What duties were left?

"I'm sure," she replied, with a slightly more obvious sarcastic undercurrent than there would be, had she already drunk a couple of cups of caffeine.

"Her Majesty requests a personal briefing – on the raid as well as on Sir Harry Potter."

"Fuck." Integra didn't think that Walter's sour expression was in any way proportionate to the succinctness of her opinion, but if he felt more comfortable in his mask of propriety, she wasn't about to initiate an argument about it. They had enough serious mire to wade through without getting pettily sidetracked.

Like the fact that Her Majesty the Queen was offering a few hoops for Integra to jump through.

Unfortunately, though, Walter didn't seem to share Integra's for once mature stance, and allowed himself one of the least pertinent remarks she had ever heard form him: "Forgive the disingenuity, Sir Integra, but how would you know?"

"You're just a barrel of laughs, Walter, aren't you?" Integra snarled. Her teeth clicked in the absence of a cigar to gnaw onto.

"I admit," Walter said in his perpetual benignity, "that sufficient amount of rest does tend to put me into amiable mood, Sir Hellsing."

"I'll endeavour to keep you stressed and tired in the future," Integra retorted. "Now, would you tell me the contents of my itinerary for the day? And do refrain from petty witticism while you're at it." Yet another of the side-effects of having been continuously haunted by a Midian for almost seven years was Integra's complete lack of self-consciousness.

Integra crawled out of the bed and started shedding her uniform, ignoring Walter's gasp and shuffling. A glance assured her that her butler had turned around to face the door rather than look at her naked body.

She curled her lips. There was – there must have been – something wrong with her when she felt contemptuous of the reaction. It was proper. Perfectly proper. The only more proper thing to do would be to berate Integra for her lack of modesty and attempt to vacate the room, which had been the reaction she had garnered when she had first done this to Walter.

There was a shameful tiny part of her a little disappointed whenever Walter did the prudent thing. The faithful Anglican, the Knight of the Round Table, the soldier in her approved wholeheartedly. The nineteen-year-old girl wanted to be wanted. Integra hated the impulse, but she was too human to keep herself from indulging it once in a while.

"Lack of clothes does not decrease my hearing ability," she snapped.

Walter undoubtedly raised his eyebrow, but since he had his back turned to her, Integra couldn't see it. The man set the tray down onto a chest of drawers, and clasped his hands together.

"Her Majesty truly was quite insistent. Apparently Sir Penwood-"

"It's a regular conspiracy, isn't it," she cut in, feeling far less languid than she did a minute ago and far more aware of the general soreness of her body. "I will indulge Her Majesty, of course – whenever I find the time. Perhaps tomorrow, after the funerals?"

Walter nodded, all the while studiously focused on the pattern of the wood in front of him.

Sometimes Integra could not help but try and imagine Alucard's reaction, were he put into the same situations. She knew that the mere idea of provoking the vampire meant playing with not only fire, but war and plague and famine and death, and rationally she wanted nothing with that. Unfortunately, even generations of careful breeding had failed to eradicate irrational impulses from her line. It was the height of teenage silliness, but Integra was frequenting political circles, and thus the mere allusion that Alucard found her desirable – as he had maintained since she was thirteen – was one of the cornerstones on which she based her view of herself.

"And Penwood should learn to think twice before he endeavours to make an enemy of the Hellsing Organisation. He is neither strong nor intelligent enough to stand against us-"

"He is quite crafty, if you forgive me the impertinence," Walter opined.

"His arrogance grows along with his girth," Integra returned, feeling justified in her contempt of Penwood. The man was a child playing at a political personage. All that he had was what his lawyers had managed to salvage of his father's entail. "I will not be cowed by someone as nearsighted and as self-important as that."

Walter's quiet sigh resounded.

Integra huffed and walked into the bathroom, feeling entitled to her morning (if only barely) shower. There was effort in maintaining long hair in acceptable condition, and she didn't have the time and energy to dedicate to it, but she certainly could make sure to wash it every three-to-five days. Appearing in front of the Queen with oily hair was like an acceptance of failure. Unless and until there was a country-wide emergency, Integra was going to do the best to maintain the illusion of a cold, unapproachable and yet highly effective operative.

"I am afraid," Walter spoke loudly from the bedroom, "that your duties for today otherwise consist of military management, Sir Integra. Replacement of lost officers, recruitment and training-"

"And dinner with Jonathan," Integra cut in, remembering the meeting they had agreed on none too specifically. She stepped under the showerhead and turned the tap, not as much as shivering when the initial wave of cold water hit her. She had some eight hours to prepare a strategy, implement it, and come up on top of this clusterfuck of a recon operation. "Do you think he is a danger to me, to the Organisation, the Queen, the Church or the State?"

The silence stretched for too long. Integra almost thought that Walter hadn't heard her, or pretended not to have heard her, over the sound of rushing and falling water, but then he replied: "Yes. Yes, he could be dangerous, if he so chose."

Integra nodded. After the debacle of the past few days, she thought it was time to take Walter's opinion into account. "Very well. I'll have Alucard neutralise him." One way or another.

x

The only ritual Harry could recall which he had been a part of was the resurrection of Voldemort, and he always excused the haziness of the memory to himself as stress and fatigue and pure terror. This was different. This was himself, doing something, actively, something amoral, which he hated in principle, but out of self-preservation he couldn't condone any other action…

The final spells faded and he sagged, supported by the ever-present supernatural being. The toes of his boots scuffed against the polished stone of the floor and he put his arms in front of himself, supporting himself on the altar or surgical table or whatever it was meant to be. The edge of the thing cut into his palms. He felt faint – not nearly enough sleep, no food, perhaps an onset of dehydration.

"What have you done?" Alucard hissed into his ear.

"I added my lock to the Hellsings'," Harry admitted. His voice sounded weak to him, and his first impulse after he forced himself to meet Alucard's eyes was to apologise, but he had been reared to battle evil, so that was what he did. Saying sorry when he had saved people was wrong, and he was the kind of person who _had_ to do the right thing.

Alucard wasn't nearly as angry as Harry had feared he would be. He had not even stopped protecting Harry from the foul Darkness of the room; he simply stared and waited. What was there to say? Well, he probably did deserve an explanation… unless it had not been his idea in the first place.

"Was this another of Integra's 'tests'?" Harry asked under his breath. All his effort to make his voice stronger had failed miserably, but he told himself, again and again, that it was wrong to be sorry.

"Ah. You noticed, then?" the vampire asked, carefully maintaining an illusion of equanimity.

Harry blushed and had to look away from the stare to recollect his courage. "It was a bit heavy-handed," he remarked. Malfoy's plans had been about as sophisticated – when they had all been thirteen – and he would not even think about Voldemort's. Notably, that would make it less likely for this second testing to have been devised by the same person, so unless Integra had let Walter help this time… "Or was it _your_ test?"

"Mine?" Alucard asked with cat-like curiosity, suggesting for the second time that his ability to read Harry's mind wasn't nearly as absolute as he pretended. He was a superb actor, so it hardly meant anything.

Harry tried to back away, but a white-gloved hand gripped the front of his shirt and held him in place. He had just recovered enough to bear the crimson stare again, if flushing like a tomato. An aspect of Alucard, no matter that it was invisible and intangible, enwombed him and he felt safer than he had felt anywhere since Quirrell had hexed his broom in the first year (that was the instance Hogwarts ceased being a safe haven).

He clutched the cold wrist in front of his solar plexus with both hands and did his very best to put his observations from the early morning into words. He impressed even himself: "You didn't really want me to break the seal. You love serving them – serving _her_. Her chastity is hardly relevant. Your pride isn't damaged by kneeling in front of her and in her orders, in your work, you find something to do – someone to be. Without Hellsing, you would fade into the woodwork, wouldn't you? Unless you went on a pointless rampage, and that would be such a step down for you…" Harry wondered if he was actually pleading, but at least his voice had gotten gradually stronger during his rant. "You can release the seals; there are situational conditions on them, but you can do so without her permission if your weaker form's continued existence is objectively threatened.

"You did not want me to free you. Were _you_ testing me?" Harry was so tired of being doubted, so tired of the never-ending scrutiny of people who had no claim to him.

Alucard pulled, and against the force Harry had no way of struggling. He let himself be dragged over the cold stone to the desk – an altar, he couldn't stop himself from thinking – and lifted up on it. The frail fabric in Alucard's fingers ripped, and Harry landed hard, doubly aware of the roughness of the wood. He remained sitting, bewildered.

"I have a piece of your magic in me," Alucard said, while a maniacal grin spread across his face. His breath smelled sweet and coppery. "No matter where you go, I will eventually be able to find you."

With that ominous, humour-filled declaration, Alucard took his leave. He dematerialised, and his very presence – the consciousness and power and permeating bloodlust – disappeared from the room. Still, the gently fluctuating protective cocoon around Harry remained. Harry realised he was now entitled to that protection, according to the contract that had come into effect via the ritual

Harry, sitting in the centre of a chalk circle, understood that he had been outsmarted. That was the natural order of things, after all – Harry was meant to always be outsmarted – but he should have had Hermione there to make sense of everything for him.

x

Integra was mostly trained out of bemoaning the multitude and variety of smaller and bigger annoyances her life was rife with, but on days like these she gave herself a break and ranted into her long since cold cup of tea with such viciousness, that if it had contained milk it would have curdled.

Aside from one of the most spectacularly FUBAR operations in her six-year-long career, followed by miles and miles of red tape, she was swamped in an amount of work that practically guaranteed that she wouldn't have a chance to sleep for weeks, and on top of that she still had to deal with Her Majesty's political maneuver of a Knighted teenager. Plus, if that wasn't enough (and it was much more than enough, and, work be damned, Integra was going to the range right after dinner to unwind), the gracious Elizabeth the Second demanded not only a report, but also a personal audition.

Integra briefly wondered for which of her recent so-designated failures she was going to be chastised, and slammed the stapler hard enough to leave an indentation through several sheaves of paper.

She just wasn't a politician.

"Why don't I have a secretary?" she asked. She meant for it to be rhetorical, but wasn't all that surprised to receive an answer.

"Because you trust no one, Master."

Integra shoved the stapler back into a drawer and considered if she should be concerned about the muffled cackling that followed Alucard's statement, or if it was yet another of his endless attempts to frighten or unbalance her.

"Has it nothing to do with your homicidal prejudice against most people who invade my personal space?" she retorted.

Alucard's cackling tapered off after a while. Integra stood, took out a cigar and lit it. Contrary to popular opinion, she was perfectly competent with a lighter. Some might even say too competent. A big part of her job was government-sanctioned arson, and there had been many times when she had to do the more distasteful parts herself.

She didn't need Walter to hold her bloody hand, damn it!

"The Angel relayed your orders to me, Miss Hellsing," Alucard spoke again, not dignifying Integra' s previous question with an answer.

Integra turned to look out of the windows. The training grounds were empty. In fact, the only living creature she could see was one of the dogs running along the outer fence. She wished the sun would be setting already. Not that she was hungry – she could always call Walter if she needed anything – but on days like these, when the piles of work were heaping, she was frustrated enough to smoke like a chimney. She also hated pushing big obligations in front of herself; she just wished it would be over already.

"And?" she growled, rubbing her nape to get her tense muscles to relax as much as she could. What a goddamn, tedious, stretching day.

"And," Alucard repeated with unholy glee, "I _regret_ that I cannot comply with them."

"What?" Only the low pitch of Integra's voice prevented her from screeching. "What do you mean 'cannot comply'? Have you changed him _already_?" She clenched her fists in rage, squashing the cigar – which she summarily threw to the floor – and wished there was something to punch, or at the very least somewhere the glare.

"Is everything in order, Sir Integra?" Walter inquired, poking his head into the door.

No, everything was very much not in order, and was that just Integra's impression or had that been a really retarded question?

Walter was lucky she had gotten rid of the corpse of her cigar, else she would have probably lobbed it at his face.

"I have not," Alucard's voice said.

"_Explain_!" Integra hissed.

Walter took that as an invitation to enter and attempt to moderate. "What seems to be the source of your dissatisfaction, Sir Integra?"

_Dissatisfaction_? Was that Walter's professionalism, or just plain English evasion? And were they working together – was _everybody_ working together – just to make Integra's life as complicated as bloody possible?

Was there something unclear about her orders? She _owned_ Alucard, and when she commanded, she expected to be obeyed.

"I literally cannot 'deal with the Knightling,' as you put it, Master," Alucard assured her, as mirthfully as if he were watching the systematic dismemberment of a choir of angels. "You so kindly allowed me to play with him, with only the stipulations that I may not harm him and I may not turn him without his consent. We struck a deal."

"How is that a problem?" Integra snarled. A thing like Alucard couldn't be expected to keep its word. Why would it? It had no fears. No emotional attachments. It liked pain. Betrayal was a game to it. Integra was hard-pressed to trust Alucard as far as his leash extended – and she did that only because she was aware of just how much her survival and the survival of the Hellsing Organisation (and, consequently, of Great Britain and the Anglican Church as well) depended on him.

There was no way he could get away with telling her no.

"A little magic-users' trick…" Alucard said with nonchalance contrived to drive Integra to higher levels of aggravation. "Deals are enforced."

With bared teeth and a silencing glare directed at Walter, Integra forced out: "Surely _you_ have nothing to worry about."

"Usually I'd squash the bug until it crunched," Alucard said easily. He grinned – most likely imagining the crunch of crushed bones and the splat of the bloodied flash. "This time, however, I can _not_."

In the following moment of quiet, Walter noiselessly shuffled over to the desk, standing off to the side, trying to keep out of the direct line of fire. Ostensibly he tended to the dangerously inclined tower of stapled forms, but Integra knew he had relocated to show her his support. Ordinarily – in battle or in the so-called diplomatic situations – she appreciated his staunch support, but when it came to her and Alucard, Walter could butt out.

Dismissing the hovering butler to the edge of her consciousness, Integra turned sideways in her chair and contemplated her options. What was there she could say or do now – when the God-damned vampire had ruined her plan before she had even fully formulated it? He was telling the truth – there was no doubt in her mind about that for he wouldn't have been nearly so gleeful about a bluff – and therefore 'Harry' was off-limits to the Hellsings' pet Monster. He had seen too much, plain _knew_ too much about the workings of the Organisation and Integra's mind… for God's sake, he knew about _Alucard_. He couldn't be let go.

"I'll kill you," she hissed at the vampire, clenching her fists and trembling in frustration.

Everybody present in the room realised just how pathetic a threat that was. Walter staunchly kept his silence and straight face. Alucard laughed so madly that were he at all corporeal, he would have busted something.

Eventually he grew tired of the hilarity, and offered a patronising: "You are welcome to try, Integra."

Of course, Integra thought wrathfully, he thought of it as a game, a game in which Integra would get the chance to feel like the cat for a change, hunting the mouse. Only the mouse would soon enough – because neither Alucard nor Integra were at all patient – morph into a hellhound and bite back.

Integra had seen Alucard's hellhounds bite through a grown man. Disgusting, slobbery creatures. Both hellhounds and men.

Walter gathered an armful of papers and straightened. He briefly deliberated, and eventually offered Integra a tired but sharp-edged smile.

Integra didn't need words to understand the implication. There were other people perfectly capable of disposing of a threat to Hellsing's security. She had done so before – last night, even. Walter had done so too many times to count. There were also others, but Integra saw no reason to not keep these cards close to her chest. The less people who knew about the true extent of Sir Harry Potter's abilities, the better, and she wasn't the type to send a misinformed agent onto a critical mission.

Unless she could get something out of it, but this wasn't the case.

She would assign the mission to Walter. He was perfectly capable of killing one sleeping magic-user. Then she would have Alucard create Potter's likeness and parade it around the town. That would suffice as an alibi for the Organisation.

"If you think so," Alucard said conversationally. He blinked, slowly enough that Integra got trapped staring into his eyes shaded behind the orange lenses. "But before you do, think of what Elizabeth will say when she finds how ill-used her little magician was in your care."

Integra so very much yearned to grip something's throat in her fingers and squeeze until it died. She hated it when the vampire was right.

Another while of silence passed between the three fighters, and once it became apparent that Sir Hellsing wasn't going to issue any orders yet, Alucard disappeared and Walter took a step backwards.

The butler made his way to the door, reached for the handle and paused. He turned and spoke: "I originally came to inform you that the first reports have come in, Sir Integra. So far all negative."

At least that was something. Admittedly, Integra was not in the mood to appreciate it.

She raised her hand in wordless dismissal. As soon as the door closed behind Walter, she took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. At this rate, she would have to go to the range _before_ dinner just to make sure she wouldn't snap and kill the pseudo-Knight at the dinner table to relieve her anger.

x

Harry had spent the better part of the afternoon doing anything that would distract him from what he had committed and the implications of the deed. He put a lot of effort into not weighing the moral acceptability of enslaving magical creatures against condoning boredom-fuelled indiscriminate genocide.

Life as a cognitive entity was so inconveniently complicated.

He had taken his leave from the basement once he had felt Alucard's protection around him dissipating. He had summoned Prongs to alert Hermione to his continued well-being and requested a posse for tomorrow, because it would be just like Integra to try and stop him from leaving. He wasn't sure what she could do – except order Alucard to stop him, and he wasn't sure that would work anymore – but he didn't want to risk it.

Wow. Himself, Harry James Potter, planning ahead. Next thing he knew, pigs would start to fly.

Anyway, a day spent as an unofficial detainee of the Hellsing Organisation, half-afraid that someone was going to pull a gun on him and try to kill him to make sure he didn't tattle on Integra, and generally dreading the upcoming interrogation over dinner, was one of the most stressful times in his recent life. Since Voldemort was dead, he had only had a couple of days like this – his Knighting notwithstanding.

He was glad when quarter to eight rolled by and a maid knocked on his bedroom door to ask him, very politely, if he was ready. She led him to the dining room, which was already set up. Harry was overjoyed to see that there was only one set of cutlery provided.

He took the seat that was pointed out to him, amused and nervous all at once when he realised that he was sitting strategically opposite a rather bright lamp. He felt a corresponding amusement, with a hint of excitement, from the resident vampire. There were no words, just an invisible, intangible presence, but it was – for the most part – in a good mood, so Harry figured that he wasn't in immediate danger of being exsanguinated over the course of the meal. He slouched, glad for the shadow his fringe was casting, and glanced at the open door.

Integra stomped in, leaving behind a trail of muddy footsteps.

"Good evening…?" Harry said, before he could think better of it. It, very apparently, wasn't a good evening for Integra Hellsing. It wasn't a good one for himself, either.

"Yes, right," the woman said, blinking as if she only just realised that Harry was present in the room. She sank into a chair almost directly opposite Harry, in front of the bright lamp; one of her joints – Harry couldn't tell which one – popped. She set a gun onto the tablecloth next to a china vase with perfumed pink flowers.

Harry gulped.

"Get me a bottle of white!" Integra bellowed at the servants, searching around in the inner pocket of her jacket. She pulled out a cigar and lit it from one of the candles on the table.

Harry was loathe to even think about why there were vases and candles on the table. Maybe to disguise the fact that it was the setting for his interrogation?

One of the maids paused at the corner of the table. "Any particular-"

"The first bottle you'll see!" Integra barked.

"Y-yes, Ma'am," the woman squeaked and hurried away.

Harry wondered how much Integra was paying her employees. It must have been a lot, if she still had people willing to work for her. He didn't have much room to talk, though. He had alienated his friends when he was high-strung. He was also about to start working for the Ministry of Magic. The magical government wasn't nearly as bad as it had been before or during the war, but he was beginning to believe that incompetence was compulsory for all bureaucrats. As an Auror, he would be under the command of corrupt, stupid and bigoted men and women.

Sometimes it was hard not to care about that stuff and instead think about the citizens he would be helping.

Harry was startled out of his contemplation by the harried serving woman, who rushed back into the room, carrying a green bottle and all sorts of thingamajigs that were apparently necessary accessories.

Integra seemed to be patient enough to wait for her glass to be filled, now that she had had her nicotine dose. She breathed out a cloud after a cloud of stinky smoke, and her eyes followed the maid's hands as the woman struggled to open the bottle and pour its contents despite the shaking of her hands.

"Isn't that against the commandments?" Harry asked as Integra downed her wine and looked to the door. Another servant, carrying a steaming bowl of soup, came in.

Alucard, amused yet still incorporeal, replied: "The Lord-"

"-will have bigger bones to pick with her," Harry muttered under his breath, while Integra spoke clearly: "-shall judge me. Your opinion means nothing. You are nothing."

Harry gave a start when he felt a tendril of darkness wrap around his neck – in warning rather than any intention to harm, but he understood the threat. Integra was to be mocked gently, and while it wasn't necessary to observe the usual social niceties, her Faith was to remain sacred.

Harry wouldn't have particularly cared – Integra had made it more than obvious that she didn't think much of him and held no respect for his values; he would have been ready to return the favour… were it not for Alucard.

Harry knew from experience he tended to be interested in the people that were bad for him – in Cho initially, then in Malfoy during their sixth year and in Integra – or Mina, as he had initially known her – afterwards. Now Alucard held his interest, with undiminished intensity. Harry pressed his palm to his belly and felt the frantic palpitation in his abdominal artery. It was familiar. Like the goose bumps and the shortness of his breath, like the certainty that no one could ever understand how he felt and why. He noticed a trend in his fascinations: each one was more dangerous than the one preceding it. Still, he had a single consolation – there was probably nothing more dangerous than Alucard that the universe could fling at him.

x

Integra wasn't drunk or stressed enough to not pause and think about Potter's reaction to being so utterly baselessly belittled.

He smiled.

He fucking _smiled_.

And it wasn't the patronising smile that would have been the response of someone wiser, someone so above her mocking that it didn't touch them and that they would be compelled to in turn mock her attempt at provoking them. This was a hard, bitter smile with too many teeth in it, shiver-inducingly similar to the way Alucard smiled sometimes in his less guarded moments.

"I highly doubt you know anything about God at all. You are not even baptised, and I doubt you have ever set foot in a church." Already as she was speaking she could see that her jab wasn't going to work. The boy did not care about religion, and therefore he would not be angered by any insults directed at his lack of Faith. She was needlessly opening herself to a counter-attack at one of her own weaknesses.

As soon as she came to this conclusion, the attack was launched.

"I find the Christian Church to be a thoughtlessly cruel, mercenary organisation," Potter said, ladling soup onto his plate. He sniffed it, and there was a flash of green light coming from under the table where, Integra suspected, he was holding his wand.

Apparently satisfied that the food wasn't drugged, Potter picked up his spoon and started eating.

Integra gritted her teeth. It was an insult she was not able to swallow. She tried – God was her witness – but she just could not. "A faithless barbarian like you could not understand the grace of the Lord-"

"I understand plenty," Potter cut in, scowling. "One year of History lessons at our school was dedicated to witch-burning, _Malleus Maleficarum_, Inquisition… the works. So, tell me how my friends and I are so evil that we deserve to be tortured and burned at a stake."

Integra clenched her fists. There was no response to that. Someone who lacked Faith could not be convinced. She knew better than to write him off as evil. She had seen evil. Potter was simply ignorant. He could not comprehend the grace, and although he knew a little about sacrifice and duty, his upbringing had left him woefully misguided.

He was right in that the Church did have its colourful history and had not always necessarily acted in the name of justice, but there had been many valid reasons for witch-burnings. There had been those who summoned demons, those who inflicted plagues, who decimated crops and livestock. The Church was protecting those of Faith, in the name of Lord. Integra, at the head of the Hellsing Organisation, was following in her forefathers' wake, shielding the innocent from Darkness.

Even if, some days, she was doing a shitty job of it.

"Your powers are unnatural, and you do not use them for the good of the Lord's people," Integra said.

Potter snorted. "You don't know a damn thing about my powers. You don't know anything about us. Besides, I protected the damned people, even though they did nothing to deserve it."

Integra poured herself another glass of wine, partly to hide how disconcerted she was by the fact that Potter was absolutely right.

She hesitated, then reached across the table for Potter's glass, and filled it as well. She passed it back.

Potter looked at her, surprised. He did accept the glass eventually, although he checked it again for tampering. He was being paranoid, Integra thought, but she also realised that paranoia was a very useful tool in keeping one alive.

"They will never deserve it," Integra said.

Potter grimly smiled and clinked glasses with her. "That much I understand of deliverance."

"That, however, does not lessen our obligations," Integra continued. She disliked hearing herself preaching, but also remembered her Father's speeches to her, from a long time ago, and that memory rekindled her vigour. "We are the strong ones. We have been chosen, we have accepted that responsibility, and we have been acknowledged for it."

"Oh no," the boy protested, sipping the wine and making a face at the bitter taste. "Not the martyrdom speech again, please." He closed his eyes and sighed; the gust bent the flame of the nearest candle.

"Piety has never been a requirement for sainthood," Integra remarked. She was religious – religiously so, if the pun could be pardoned – but she had never much cared for the pathos of the so-called saints. She was taught to respect honour, obligation, courage and determination, and also the judicious use of cruelty; the legends about the saints, however, rarely mentioned shed blood or brutalised creatures of the Dark. "Mostly, they're just soldiers caught in the war between the Lord and the Dark."

Harry rolled his eyes and set down his spoon.

Integra hated interrogation. She was bad at it, due to her short temper and nonexistent acting skills. She also, belatedly, recalled that two years ago Jonathan had effortlessly bested her in a verbal exchange. Never mind, though; she was only trying to get out of him whatever she could before she had Walter execute him.

She sent her soup bowl away unused. She already had enough liquid in her stomach, and the roasted meat she had smelled in the corridor was making her mouth water. It was, technically, too heavy for dinner, but she didn't expect to go to sleep for hours yet.

"Why did you not refuse accompanying me on the raid?" Integra asked. She was being too direct, too crude.

It only worked because Potter had no qualms about sharing that information: "Because the objective of this excursion is two-sided, Mina. Not only are you supposed to check me out. I should be checking you out, too."

That made sense. Too much sense. Of course he was expected to report – but to whom? To his 'magical' society's authorities? To a third party? Or – as Alucard had suggested – to Her Majesty? No, that was hardly warranted. Integra had made her share of bad decisions, but overall she and the Organisation held up well under the pressure, and there was no reason to suspect her of either dereliction of duty or treason. Besides, the Queen didn't need to insert a spy into the Hellsing Manor, not when she already had Alucard wrapped around her little finger.

Integra served the Queen. She had no right to be irked by her own servant's tendency to obey royalty to the point of defying her.

"To whom are you reporting?" she demanded.

Harry shrugged, not concerned by her intimidating tactics or even the very real and visible presence of her weapon. It was as if he believed himself safe. The folly did not fit with the paranoia he had displayed previously, and Integra suddenly felt a chill when she remembered that Alucard refused to touch the boy.

"I am under no obligation to tell you that," Potter told her, smiling in appreciation and muttering thanks to the servant who had brought him the next course. He repeated the anti-tampering 'spell' under the table, picked up the cutlery and looked at her, glasses glinting and obscuring his eyes. "Integra… I don't like you, but I'm not seeking to destroy you either. From what I've seen, your Organisation and my people can live side by side, like they have been doing up to now. Interaction is unnecessary and I'd go as far as to say undesired."

He nodded to reinforce his assertion and tucked into the meat and potatoes. It was, Integra believed, a generous and tasty last meal.

"You will recommend that we maintain complete separation?" she inquired with almost believable civility, attending to her own plate. It smelled wonderful.

Too bad that she could not enjoy it.

She wanted nothing to do with the magic-users. In her opinion, they were too much of a risk, and should not be allowed to spread the disease – worse yet, their self-government made them into a separate entity. Already there had been a civil war with causalities among the innocent. How long would it be before they became a legitimate threat? No logic helped, unfortunately, for as long as the Queen chose to keep them going as they were.

"I think Her Majesty should suffice as our contact point," Potter unknowingly agreed with her. "You'll deal with the creepy-crawlies threatening your subjects, we'll deal with ours."

"Am I to simply accept your decision in the matter?" Integra growled. She narrowed her eyes at the over-confident Knightling and clutched her knife so hard that she could feel the Hellsing crest on its handle imprinting itself into her palm.

"I don't see how you have another choice," Potter replied, shrugging again. He put another morsel into his mouth, chewed and swallowed, all without taking his eyes off of her. "I wanted to be your friend, Mina," he said.

Potter tilted his head, losing the bright reflection of light from his glasses, and instead Integra had the opportunity to look into his eyes. They were green, as she had noted before, shadowed, and it seemed like he was judging her.

"You refused the friendship," he said, "so I think civility's the best you can hope for now."

x

Integra found out nothing more from Harry over the course of the dinner, and once the dessert was about to be finished and the young woman had moved onto her fifth glass of wine, Harry was ready to exact some mild revenge for the grilling he had received.

He had an idea. He probably wouldn't have done it if not for the slight buzz induced by the wine with which Integra had tried to ply him… but that was her own fault. As if he had not noticed he was being interrogated. Now her attempt to simplify her own job backfired.

Harry slid out of his chair and started on a walk around the dining hall, checking out the framed portraits and photographs on the walls.

Integra subconsciously followed his movement, but she didn't consider him a threat – she generally didn't think much of him – and so she kept her eyes on the piece of cake in front of her. Harry paced for a while, until she stopped being so aware of him, and then he began to cast nonverbal spells – one to transfigure his clothes into a leather overall, another to lengthen his hair until its tips hung around his hips. It was unexpectedly heavy and he had to fight to keep his head up. It was promising to be worth the effort, though.

He approached Integra from the back; she was aware of him, but she still startled when a long strand of black hair slithered over her shoulder. She leaned as far away as possible and reached for her gun.

She didn't pick it up, in the end. She caught on and instead of a bullet shot Harry a scowl.

He grinned, mildly disappointed that he hadn't thought to add an illusion of fangs, but apparently even a toothless green-eyed version of Alucard was creepy.

"Y-you're _not_ one of his familiars," Integra hissed with utter conviction. "You are not. I would have known."

"You are correct," Harry replied. "Which means I'm not your servant."

Integra swept up her gun so fast that Harry barely had time to blink. She leapt out of her seat.

Harry cocked his head to the side and laughed: such an innocent, simple joke that the Weasleys wouldn't even blink at it, and it frightened this powerful, cold, hard woman more than feral vampires and armies of ghouls.

"How is it that _I_ can scare you more than Alucard does?" he asked, shaking his head. The hair rippled around him and his neck was beginning to seriously ache, so he released the charm.

Integra was still breathing hard, and had yet to move from the fighting stance, so he guessed it was his best bet to withdraw with grace and let her cool off.

"Nighty-night, Integra," he said, unable to help himself, waved at her and scarpered.

He closed the door quietly, grinning at a staring pair of maids that were coming to pick up the used dishes. A crash, the sound of shattering china and a vulgarism came from the dining hall a moment later. Harry leaned against the hardwood door and burst into laughter.

Then shadows congealed around him and suddenly he wasn't where he had been.

An unyielding, cold shape pressed him into a wall that appeared behind his shoulder blades. Everything had gone dark, but he was reassured that he wasn't blind when he found two crazed crimson eyes shining in the blackness… then three eyes, four… fifty. The creature laughed and Harry relaxed, startled into a chuckle when he felt the third and fourth hand on his body… and what he thought were probably tentacles.

"You are a whole different kind of Monster," Alucard told him, and Harry went on chuckling, wondering what the vampire meant by the hold he had Harry in. It was a cradle and a strait-jacket at the same time.

"Lumos," Harry whispered. The room, a windowless (presumably underground) cell was accessible only through a single heavy metallic door that came into view illuminated by dim green glow. With the exception of emotion-fuelled Summoning Charms, this was the extent of Harry's wandless abilities.

Alucard shrunk into his usual humanoid red-coated (albeit hat-less and long-haired) form so fast that Harry only glimpsed a suggestion of a different shape.

He seemed impressed – the way a parent would be impressed with a toddler that managed to write his own name with a finger into spilt custard.

"Hello, little Knight," Alucard breathed, grinning.

Harry couldn't think of a more prudent reaction than to grin right back.

"You truly are not the least bit frightened of me," the vampire said with the slightest hint of incredulous hilarity. "Not the tiniest sign of fear," he continued, his voice gradually lowering into a suggestive whisper, "is there, Sir Harry?" He leaned closer and closer-

Harry felt his pulse rising. "Integra wasn't so pissed at me that she would order you to hurt me, was she?" he whispered back.

Alucard didn't reply, merely laughed again as his jaws locked around Harry's throat and his cold, rough tongue pressed against the pulse-point.

Harry's blood raced, but with every instant in which Alucard didn't bite down his heart-rate slowed. Eventually he went as far as to lock his arms around Alucard's neck. The wild, dancing hair slithered into his face and he lightly carded his fingers through it. He was still, after all those years, so affection-starved that he would relish in even such a twisted embrace.

Alucard's shadow snuck in behind Harry's back and isolated him from the biting cold of the stone. The jaws released Harry's throat, and he was sure he had teeth imprints, perhaps even a bruise…

"You let your minions believe you are stupider than you are," Alucard remarked.

Harry felt so elated – whether due to alcohol, exhaustion and adrenaline, or because of some vampiric manipulation – that he wanted to pout. He refrained, but thinking of his friends – his little following of wizards and witches waving their wands and saying their magic words – he for the first time realised that his own life was such a tiny walled-in fairy-tale. Harry was the orphaned step-brother used as a slave and the prince of a land behind seven mountains and seven rivers; he had outsmarted a troll and killed a dragon and never thought there were worse things in the wide, unknown world.

But Integra had been correct in that one thing: Harry didn't know true evil yet. Even Voldemort – poor abandoned, abused Tom Riddle – had been, until the end, human. Sure, he had been a twisted, broken, power-hungry, obsessive megalomaniac with sadistic and genocidal tendencies, but Harry could see and draw the parallels between him and Alucard. Tom deserved no pity, but the vilification of him had been a little extreme.

He hadn't been any worse than Attila, Caesar or Hitler, as far as Harry's knowledge of history extended.

"Only a little; just to get me out of the additional work," Harry said, because, now that he thought about it, he liked to believe that he wasn't stupid. He had never aspired to cleverness. It had never occurred to him that he might be smart. He did as much as was required and devoted his free time to things that made him happy. Learning had never entranced him – except when it came to unusual and possibly dangerous things. Then his curiosity, like Hagrid's, knew no rational bounds.

He scowled at the vampire's face hovering inches from his. "And now I'm seriously ticked off! You took me here through some wicked form of vampire travel, and I don't remember a thing of it!"

Alucard ignored his complaints and, not to be led off on a tangent, returned to the previous topic: "Why the deception?"

Harry tried to shrug but, suspended in the air as he was, that turned out to be impossible. "I am a fairly non-confrontational person. Have a peek inside my head: it's all there clear for you to see."

"You are a shameless liar," Alucard stated, apparently having taken Harry up on the – superfluous – offer. Then, with a note of surprise that Harry found unwarranted, he said: "And you are falling asleep."

"I've had a trying day. You don't even need to do the hypnosis-thing on me," Harry retorted, having no idea whatsoever if his captor wasn't actually hypnotising him. It would explain why his situation didn't bother him.

He was laid onto something soft – like bedding – and Alucard snatched his glasses off of his face. Harry squinted up at the vampire over a dark wall that blocked the lower half of his scope. Alucard was a blur of black and red and greenish grey.

It was chilly, so he cast a Warming Charm on himself.

"Do make yourself comfortable," Alucard invited him, and with a cackle added: "I'll be out, hunting."


	7. Omnia Causa Fiunt

A/N: Dear readers, I'm very, very sorry for taking so long to finish this story. It's done now.

On another note, please allow me a bit of a rant (you are in no way obligated to read it, just tolerate it). I am grateful for each and every review (thank you!), and after the last chapter I was admittedly unsurprised about the shout-outs about slash.  
There is not going to be slash in this story – I like to think that I'm pretty conscientious about warnings, and I realise that some people are sensitive about it. Siven80 described it as a 'horrid slash vibe.' Uhm. I was wondering if it was horrid because it was slashy, or because I've failed at describing it or something? Should I put in warnings about 'vibes' to avoid offending anyone? While I'm at it, should I warn about the presence of homosexual characters? How about Muslims, should I mention them in advance? What about black people? Republicans? Also, there's about as much slash here as there was pedophilia in the anime (Master of Monster, anyone?). You've _got_ to expect Alucard's behaviour to offend your sensibilities – otherwise he would be OOC.  
Another issue I have, which also has less to do with principles and more with Hellsing, is that I don't see Alucard as necessarily gender-specific. It's canon. We've seen a female Alucard. Granted, he is mostly so masculine that even his metrosexual tendencies don't mess up his alpha-male status, but he's in fact an amorphous blob that can take whatever shape it likes. (…should I warn about bestiality? necrophilia? Hellsing itself?)  
And lastly, you are welcome to dislike Harry's reaction to the sexual overtone in Alucard's manipulation (i.e. his not running away screaming about gay vampires). I maintain that within the storyline it is justified and in character. There.

Either way, last chapter, here for you to enjoy or not. I will be impatiently awaiting your reaction. Thanks, and see you.

Brynn

PS: I wrote this rant months ago. I discovered it now as it is, found that I still agree with it, so I'm posting it. Hopefully, nobody with actual thought-processes going on will be offended.

x

Chapter Seven: Omnia Causa Fiunt

x

6th of June 1999

x

"I apologise for my failure, Sir Integra," Walter said in an unusually gravelly voice. He was stooping entirely too much, as if the weight of an active night in conjunction with unfulfilled orders caused him to feel his true age for once.

Integra bit down on her latest cigar (she purposely had not counted them, so she didn't know its exact number) because she had already spent most of her energy raging. She surveyed the line of four uniformed men standing at attention. Three had been recently promoted, and she didn't remember their names yet. Maybe she would never bother to, if they ended like the dead man in Yossarian's tent.

"Report!" she ordered, mentally discounting Joseph Heller's sense of humour as unconstructive and inappropriate with regards to the situation.

For new promotions, the men were quite orderly. The Lieutenant in charge of the security centre – the only one of the original four – stepped forward as first.

"No new sightings, Commander," he said crisply. "Since the mark's disappearance from the main downstairs corridor, he has not appeared within the scope of any of the security cameras. Also, there were no instances of spontaneously moving objects."

Integra nodded. Potter had done a disappearing act as if he had known that he had a reason to be afraid. Was it the paranoia she had noticed acting up, or had there been something more insidious? Walter had dismissed the possibility that Potter was telepathic… But Walter was not omniscient either.

"The barracks?" Integra asked, even though she knew what the answer would be.

"Searched through, Ma'am," the soldier replied with a hint of tremor in his voice. Apparently, Integra's anger had made an impression. "No sign of the mark."

"Perimeter security?" Integra inquired, just to complete the process. At this point it was obvious that Potter wouldn't be found until he wanted to be found. He did, after all, expect a delegation of his 'friends' later today.

There was still the possibility that Potter had left for good. Integra didn't think he did, if mostly because of Alucard preventing him. And Alucard better _had_ prevented him.

"Intact," the next man in line said. "There was a report of Alucard crossing at 21:17 yesterday, moving westward. Since then, nothing."

"That means nothing. We know the mark has an ability similar to teleportation," Integra reminded them. She exerted a lot of effort to not feel inadequate for being unable to brief them on anything new and relevant. Harry Potter could make himself invisible and was capable of summoning a demon-like avatar he claimed to be a semi-physical manifestation of positive emotion, but which would readily act as a messenger when called upon. Unfortunately, any potential skill in combat he might have displayed had been voided by his cowardice – or basic caution and common sense, damn it! – so Integra had not been given the opportunity to observe him in fight.

The data was missing. There was nothing. No videos, no pictures, no reports, just third-hand accounts of how Harry Potter as the Chosen One had done his duty by dispatching the notorious criminal and mass-murderer Tom Riddle. And if there ever was any suspicion cast 'Sir' Potter's way, Her Majesty's orders made any further investigation a moot point.

"The compiled report has been distributed," Integra spoke, feeling the ice in her voice and freezing a little herself. "The evidence of his necromantic capabilities-" However circumstantial and based on supposition it may have been, Integra added mentally, "-is clear. If you see him and there is a chance, I would much appreciate Sir Harry Potter being tragically lethally wounded while stumbling upon a drill. Am I clear?"

"Yes, sir!" the Sergeant – Kellerman, his name was Kellerman – spoke in a raised voice to add credence to his exclamation.

Integra tacitly watched the men re-check their written assignments, studied their facial expressions – mostly anger, suspicion and determination were written in them – as they assimilated their orders and swept out of the room to hunt down one of the very few beings they would probably never able to pin down.

"Is it so amusing?" Integra whispered, tired and exasperated.

She was surprised at how much it surprised her to not receive a response – not even a subconscious or a mocking one.

Damn vampire! Dealing with Alucard was all about fine lines, and she couldn't afford to tolerate insubordination.

Ironically, there truly was no way to either punish or control the bastard, and she couldn't afford to leave him rot in the dungeons again either.

What, for the grace of God, was she supposed to do?

x

Harry wasn't afraid of death but he didn't want to die. He had gone to fairly great lengths to avoid death happening to him in the past, discounting some unusual circumstances where he had let himself be killed for the Greater Good. Fortunately, he somehow managed to keep breathing afterwards. He would have liked to continue breathing for a good many years yet.

That meant, he mused as he opened his eyes and rubbed the sleep from them with the heels of his hands, that he would not be accepting Alucard's offer, even though he had gotten tipsy and let the vampire pick him up and take him to his bed.

Sweet bloody Merlin.

Well, either way, he had lived to see another day. It was… Sunday? Yes, right. Sunday. He had promised Hermione he would return on Sunday. However, there was still something he had to do, and it was most likely going to completely wipe him out, so he would better send a Patronus and alert his friends that his plans were changing, before they sniffed him out somehow and attacked the Hellsing Organisation… or, worse, sent _Kreacher_ to get him.

"This is disturbing on so many levels," a female voice said, ringing with disgust.

Harry sat up. There was someone blonde and dressed in green standing in a doorway. "Mina?" He patted the bedding surrounding him for his glasses and put them on.

Integra's lips curved downwards. "How in the name of Lord did you end in that position?"

"What pos-" Harry quite suddenly realised that he was sitting inside a coffin – a roomy, luxurious one, granted, but a coffin nonetheless. "Bugger."

A glance around the room confirmed it to be Alucard's. There was a huge throne-like chair situated so that it faced the door, and next to it a table with an assortment of objects on it: a wine bottle, two wine glasses stood upside-down, a book, spectacles.

A moment later Alucard materialised in the chair, crossed his legs, took a sip from what appeared to be a plastic pack of blood, and grinned at Harry's predicament.

"Sir Harry!" Walter exclaimed in surprise, following Integra into the room.

Apparently, something was going on. Of course, they had come for Alucard and wouldn't have expected to see Harry here – unless Alucard had warned them, but judging by their surprise and Alucard's grin that wasn't the case.

"So this is where you have disappeared," the butler said grimly, and exchanged dark looks with Integra.

Harry's arms were already goosebumped with the chill of the obviously underground room, but that interaction sent a shiver down his spine. He tried to curl up on himself – funnily, Alucard's coffin felt safe. Safer even than his cupboard used to feel once upon a time.

"S'ry Walter," Harry said, and tried to smile, fairly certain that it had come out all crooked and insincere. "I don't suppose you have any coffee?" So much for a change of subject; he didn't feel like discussing his unplanned abduction last night, but if he were more awake, he would have done that much more smoothly. A coffee really wouldn't go amiss. Neither would an opportunity to brush his teeth.

"I could share my blood pack with you," Alucard offered stoically, but Harry suspected that if he were to take him up on the offer, the vampire would not be actually willing to part with it. He did not seem like a generous, altruistic, or even philanthropic person. The mocking would have been alright, too, had Harry not been hungry enough to almost welcome even that – disturbing – kind of sustenance.

"It's like family breakfast," Harry grumbled, still too sleepy to control what drivel came out of his mouth. "Only, the people present usually don't try to have me killed prior to it. Well… not since Greyback and Antigona Yaxley were arrested…" Pensive, he nibbled on his lower lip in absence of people-food. Alright, he wasn't hungry enough to conduct an experiment on how satisfying a meal human blood was to a human – because, let's face it, it _did_ have some nutritional value – but he definitely would have felt more comfortable, had Walter entered offering toast and marmalade.

"You went so far against my direct orders as to inform him of them?! You _protect_ him?!" Integra bellowed, shaking with rage.

Harry all of sudden felt much more awake. He didn't really mean what he had said the way it sounded – he realised that the mess with the doctored report was more along the lines of Integra testing him while not particularly concerned about whether he would survive – but the way the young woman reacted put the events of last night into a much different, ominous perspective.

Integra had actually truly ordered Harry killed. Alucard had saved his life.

Harry scowled. He felt the reassuring presence of his wand up his sleeve, but it wouldn't have helped him much against the vampire. Even his instincts baffled him where Alucard was concerned – why was he feeling safe?

Why was the feeling right?

Harry turned his head and stared at his host. Alucard was gleefully leering at Integra, showing off rows of beastly teeth. Even without the glasses, his eyes were muted crimson, inhuman yet entirely unexcited.

"Does he need protecting, Master?" Alucard inquired, and with a flick of his wrist cast the empty plastic bag into the corner of the room. He leant back in the chair and raised his chin high, grinning with utter self-satisfaction. "Elizabeth says she wants her wizardling back in one piece."

Harry shook his head. _Elizabeth_? As in Her Majesty the Queen of United Kingdom and whatever else? The woman who made him a bloody Knight?

Somehow, knowing that Alucard was on first-name terms with the Queen made Harry feel easier about his predicament. He still wasn't scared. He was hurt that Integra Hellsing betrayed and destroyed whatever chance of friendship there might have been between them, annoyed at the pretend power-play they were engaging in and mad as Hell for the murder attempt that she had just admitted to.

"It is nothing personal, Sir Harry," Walter assured Harry in a quiet voice, while Integra held a vulgar and descriptive debate with Alucard, who seemed mildly amused at her ire.

Harry shuffled as far away from the elderly butler as he could without trying to awkwardly climb out of the coffin, and nearly sat onto the ceremonial sabre Alucard must have given him to sleep with instead of a teddy bear.

Walter smiled. "Sir Integra divides people into two categories – those who aren't a threat and those who are. You are a supernatural being, Sir Harry, and you are definitely a threat, so it is hardly surprising that she would react to you in a matter that has been her way of life since early childhood."

"So what?" Harry asked. "We just forgive and forget?" He shook his head, gripping the sabre and pulling it to his chest as a shield of sorts. "It's not the first time someone's tried to kill me. It's not even the first time that person was someone I couldn't get back at. But you won't catch me pretending to be friends with them."

Walter's smile remained on his face as he inclined his head in an acknowledgement. "Keep in mind then, Sir Harry, that Sir Hellsing is very well protected."

Harry snorted. Like he was going to come back to this place and try and kill Integra. If Alucard was willing to go so far to protect Harry as to directly defy her when Harry had less than a day-old geas on him, the vampire would probably raze a country to the ground should Integra herself be threatened. And he would enjoy it, too.

x

"…oh do!" Alucard insisted. "Do punish me, Master! Cause me pain! Rip my flesh open and pour salt into my wounds! Shoot bullet-holes into my body and put maggots into them so they may chew through my viscera! Make me bleed you a river! Drown me in petrol and set me on fire!"

Integra helplessly closed her eyes and tried to regain her equilibrium. No one knew what sadism truly was until they encountered Alucard. He was a whole other league when it came to savagery. Sadomasochistic freak!

Good God, how was she supposed to punish him so that he wouldn't enjoy it?!

"I want the boy dead," Integra pressed through clenched teeth, glancing to the side where Walter was keeping Potter occupied and looking for an opportunity to go through with the assassination. Potter appeared to be defensive, but not frightened, which served to show that either his self-preservation was faulty, or he did not comprehend the truth of the situation.

Alucard laced his fingers on top of his knee. "Be very sure your God is with you, Master, because Her Majesty is _not_."

Integra's breath caught.

She realised – too late – that Alucard was absolutely serious about this. She couldn't recall that he had ever gone against her on anything of importance. To go over her head straight to the Queen and demand that she change Integra's orders was unprecedented…

Integra felt a little lost. She was ordered to protect, but at the same time forbidden to take the necessary measures.

When she opened her eyes again, Alucard was not laughing anymore, not even grinning or smirking. Most of his face was hidden behind a formless mass of hair, but he was obviously staring at the back of Walter's neck.

Shadows shifted.

"Stand down, Walter," Integra commanded.

Walter tensed, but a second later he seemed to relax; he half-turned, gave Integra a shallow bow and stepped to the side.

Potter, biting his lower lip and holding onto his sabre – what a mockery of the Convention of Twelve! – looked from Walter to Alucard.

Then, shocking Integra into reconsidering her perpetual lack of sleep, because she frankly couldn't believe her eyes, Potter stretched his hand out toward the vampire and in a faux childish voice said: "Up?"

Alucard went incorporeal with laughter.

While Integra mutely raged and Walter scowled and pretended to hide his disappointment in the assassination of a potential threat being called off, a multitude of white-gloved hands grew out of nowhere. They picked Potter up from his perch in Alucard's coffin and smoothly deposited him on the floor.

The boy gingerly climbed to his feet, stretched and grimaced. "Does anyone of you have a mirror? I think I've got bruises on my neck… Be wary of him, Mina, he gets abusive when _the mood_ strikes him."

Integra was aware that she was repeating herself for the umpteenth time, but she simply couldn't hold it in: "I ordered you to-"

"Oh, he liked it!" Alucard cut her off, rematerialising and once again leering. "He even gave as good as he got – do you want to see _my_ bruises?" He started unbuttoning his coat; he got to the third button before he stopped, and under Integra's glare obscenely licked his lips.

It was not his usual brand of humour, Integra noted, singularly unamused. It was too… light. If she had to wager, she would say Alucard had picked the idea from Potter's brain and enacted it without adding his unique personality into it. Small mercies.

"Enough!" she shouted, aggravating her budding headache. "I don't have the time for this! I must attend the funeral of several good men today. Sir Potter, you will remain within this room until noon – at that time I will have you escorted off the grounds of my Manor." She spun on her heel and stalked out of Alucard's cell.

It was a fitting place to leave Potter, she believed. Alucard wanted to claim him, so he could take responsibility for him, too. It _would_ solve the whole problem if Alucard just bit the boy. One way or another; she wasn't picky at this juncture.

"Why haven't you changed him yet?" she asked, ascending the stairs to ground level. Daylight stabbed her eyes, and she shielded them for a moment.

A pair of guards saluted her and she let her hand down, because it almost looked as if she had saluted first.

Walter walked off, busy with his regular duties and probably about as angry as Integra felt, if for different reasons.

"Ah, but, Miss Hellsing," Alucard replied while his body filtered into visibility, "when your conquest is strong, driven almost to ferity, and polarised negative to yourself, the connection is never instantaneous. You must approach slowly, start with soft, shallow inquests at first… then plough on, patiently showing them what lies beyond their dreams and then, when you see that look in their eyes, you will know they are ready for the ex-"

"Basically," Integra cut in before she learnt another thing about Alucard that she never wanted to know, "you believe his faith in his ideals is so strong that he would destroy himself if you turned him now."

"That, too," Alucard said faux-nonchalantly, displaying way too many teeth for one humanoid mouth.

"Disappointment might be an exciting novel experience for you," Integra grumbled, wishing that she could inflict her mood on him.

x

Once they were gone and the doors locked, Harry sighed.

He was glad that this 'visit' would be over soon. He would have liked to be able to say that he regretted coming to this place because of the near-catastrophic scenario from last night and this morning, but that would have been a lie. He was glad. Losing a chance of friendship wasn't nearly as important as discovering the threat that were the undead and becoming aware of the Hellsing Organisation.

And then there was Alucard.

Harry knew perfectly well that there was no way he would have survived if not for Alucard's whim. Still, now that the vampire had given him that much leverage, he was going to use it.

He wasn't going to be escorted off the premises on one muggle girl's say-so, because that would let the muggle girl think that she would be able to hold her own if she ever went against wizards, and that would result in hurt and loss on all sides. Idiots. Integra might have been shrewder than any wizard or witch Harry had ever met (with the possible exclusion of Snape), and there was no denying the instinctive reaction Harry had had to Walter, but without Alucard they would not stand a chance against the off-handed callousness of the wizarding way of waging war.

Integra hopefully wouldn't try anything, seeing as she proclaimed herself a loyal subject of her Queen, but if she did, Harry would go Dark Lord on Hellsing, and there would be nothing but a hole in the ground left of it soon enough. The security here at the Manor was impressive, but it wouldn't stop a determined vampire, much less an elite group of veterans of a magical war.

In mind-games Integra would invariably win. In a full-frontal assault, however, Alucard was her only chance of survival.

And Alucard would make sure that she survived – Harry would even warn him in advance, for his own safety. But Alucard didn't give a damn about the Hellsing Organisation itself or about the Manor. And Integra on her own, without any support structure, would not pose a direct threat to the wizards and witches of Britain.

It would, however, be much easier to simply discourage Integra from making any further contact. With that in mind, Harry raised his wand and incanted: "_Expecto Patronum_!"

Prongs lingered by the heavy, metal door, waiting for instructions.

"I'm coming home today, Hermione," Harry informed her. "In fact, why don't you come and pick me up at noon? Apparition coordinates are N twenty, forty-one, fifteen and half. Don't come alone, though. Take Ron and Neville or Luna. Be careful. We don't want a war with them, but some of them seem to want one with us."

Harry watched as the silvery stag jumped through the wall of Alucard's cell and then listened. There was a shout, too muffled by the distance, followed by shooting. Harry clenched his fists.

It wasn't funny. Bullets couldn't hurt Prongs, but shooting at him was like shooting at Harry himself, and Harry was both substantial and mortal. Very mortal. In fact, he hadn't been as close to death as last night in… over a year. That Alucard – the bloodthirsty King of Monsters himself – had felt the need to abduct Harry and tuck him in spoke for itself.

Harry curled up on Alucard's throne, transfigured the discarded plastic pack into a piece of paper, conjured a pencil and painstakingly created what he considered one of the best of the literary attempts of his life:

'You'll see it one day, Integra. If you remain who you are and continue doing what you do, it will happen to you: a declaration of war written in the blood of innocents, violence for violence's sake and ridiculous little hates united in one front for the purpose of stirring up bloodshed. Money will mean nothing, people will mean nothing, _sanity_ will mean _nothing_. You will be alone, against your enemies, against your allies, your country, your people – against yourself, in the end.

'I had my friends, up until the last minute when I went and willingly laid my head under the guillotine. Who will be there for _you_?

'Think about it.

'Harry'

He put the letter under the book on Alucard's table and cancelled his Lumos. The room fell pitch black.

x

For too many reasons to count, Integra did not do dresses. She still had several inside her wardrobe, but that was simply because it was too much of a hassle to argue with Walter every time she had a maid throw them out and every time they 'mysteriously' reappeared. As far as she was concerned, they were hanging there in case she needed a rug to sweep blood from the floor.

She buttoned up her jacket and already felt like she was about to melt. There was no way she would survive the afternoon in a coat.

With a sigh of frustration, she picked the black hat that belonged with this ensemble and slammed the door to her rooms extra hard.

"It is eleven thirty-eight, Miss Hellsing," Walter informed her, turning up just like that, wearing his fancy uniform. He seemed to her like a character from a black-and-white motion picture, now that the little bit of colour he usually wore was missing.

Integra checked her watch. Eleven thirty-eight.

"Let's go," she ordered.

The hall was filled with her troops, all men with mourning bands on the sleeves of their uniforms. Walter directed a fireteam to join them. They split from the main group and fell into step behind Integra, whose stomp automatically adjusted to the customary parade march.

"How is that wise?" Integra inquired on the way to the dungeons. Security had confirmed that Potter had stayed put, although Integra was at a loss about his reasons for not leaving. He had already proven that he _could_ simply vanish into thin air.

At that time she had assumed that she had an ace over anything Potter might be capable of, and that ace was Alucard. Realising that in this case Alucard was not _available_ felt worse than catching a bullet from a so-far trusted family member did.

Up to now Integra's certainty that any enemy could be overcome for as long as she had Alucard, and that she would _always_ have Alucard, which basically made her invincible, had been unshakeable. It felt as though the rug was pulled out from under her – but, of course, there were no rugs underground, because they molded and the stink was awful.

"A simple psychological advantage," Walter replied. "Bringing a squad would have made it appear as if Sir Potter was to be executed, and neither his panicking nor Alucard's intervention are desirable in this instance."

Integra nodded. Four men were few enough to make it look like they were there simply for her protection, and at the same time enough to bring to attention the fact that this was Integra's home turf and Potter most certainly did not want to do anything unwise.

"Such a pity that you could not foster a greater understanding between you," Walter said in a conversational tone. "His people could have been allies in this war."

Integra flinched. Reprimanding her in front of the soldiers – how pedagogic of Walter. She must have really annoyed him.

Although, it might just have been Walter's way of telling her 'I told you so.' He _had_ told her so.

"Allies to us or our enemies?" Integra pointed out. "Potter was knighted because he used his occult powers to kill, Walter – it is a fact you discount too easily. And you forget entirely that we are on a mission from God, Walter, we, the Royal Protestant Knights, and that Potter's people have been our enemy since the time of Henry the Eight!"

"Sir Harry is a Knight of the Convention of Twelve," Walter pointed out as they stopped in front of the door to Alucard's cell. The four men flanking them were beginning to exhibit obvious signs of anxiety. "He is an ally by definition."

"A semblance of alliance only makes it easier for him to betray his so-called allies to their deaths!" Integra exclaimed, and realised too late just how high she had raised her voice when the echo came back.

Walter adjusted his eyeglass and folded his hands. "And thus you chose to betray first, Sir Hellsing." He shook his head. "What were the qualities you expected in a Knight of the Order? Arrogance? You know what they say about birds of feather-"

"I am the only bird that would stay past the first gunshot, Walter," Integra retorted. She was well aware that Shelby Penwood would shit himself if he was faced with a vampire. "There is no point in surrounding myself with cheap imitations." Especially if the cheap imitations wielded _magic_ as their weapon of choice.

There was a motion in between her soldiers. Potts shared a look with his fellow, and they both momentarily lowered their heads in a silent accord.

Damn him! How the Hell did that boy manage to win the sympathies of _Integra's_ soldiers? She had been certain that they would at best tolerate his presence because she instructed them to, not actually accept it. Had Potter used his enchantments on them?

Integra committed their numbers to her memory and made a mental note to recommend them for a psychological evaluation.

Pity she had never had the chance to con Potter into one.

"But Sir Harry did not run," remarked Walter, ever the Devil's advocate.

With her hand already on the handle of the door, prepared to open it, Integra paused to object: "That's even worse, in some cases. With his morbid lack of fear, of course he did not run. He needed to be saved, constituting a risk for the entire operation." It compromised her skill as a leader, too. She should think through including an outsider more thoroughly next time. Still, that was not something a good leader admitted to in front of her subordinates.

x

Harry heard the tail end of Integra's argument with her butler (and advisor, apparently), so he was ready when the door opened with a dull clang and she appeared in the light-filled doorway.

It took his eyes a few seconds to get used to the illumination, and he used those seconds to say: "You should cut down on the cigars and the alcohol and the drugs, Mina. Find other means to relieve stress. This way you'll kill yourself and the Dark will run roughshod over your 'innocents'."

No one tried to shoot him; Harry counted that as a success.

Walter simply gave Integra a look that made it obvious he had told her so, many times.

"_Tempus_," Harry cast once he could see. The numbers 11:52 appeared floating in front of him.

The four soldiers Integra had brought along as her bodyguards (pointlessly – as if either of them could be half as effective as Alucard) let out various sounds of surprise; one went as far as to draw his gun.

"Come!" Integra commanded.

She didn't insist on Harry being hand-cuffed or anything; he was free to walk on his own, in between Integra, the strangely frightening old butler and the four soldiers, one of whom was Mike. Harry hadn't expected friendliness from that side, but during an unguarded moment Mike surprised him by quirking his lips in a bitter half-smile.

The front hall of the Manor was full of soldiers. Harry sincerely doubted that they were gathered there to see him off, but at the same time he didn't think they were there to see his untimely death. Integra had mentioned funerals, so it made sense that they appeared solemn.

Come to think of it, so did Integra – solemn and irritated. Maybe she was going through a withdrawal?

Obviously not. Just as Harry thought that, Integra pulled out a cigar and had Walter light it for her. Walter returned the lighter to the pocket of his jacket and wordlessly dismissed Mike and the other three soldiers, who were instantly swallowed by the rows of their fellows.

"You have too much power," Harry said quietly, his eyes roaming the lines upon lines of uniformed men in front of him.

Integra bit down on her cigar, very nearly severing it. "How, pray tell, did you come to that conclusion?"

"Mina, if you want to control your power, you've got to come into it gradually," Harry replied, although he doubted she would understand, on the off chance she even tried to understand what he was telling her. Her being the Commander of the Hellsing Organisation was somewhat like making the Hogwarts Head Boy the Minister of Magic upon his graduation. However many predispositions for the position Integra had, however much she had learned by observing and from tutorials, she didn't have the experience to handle the responsibility thrust upon her.

Funny, how two years ago Harry thought it had been the other way around – that he didn't have the experience needed to fight a war, and Mina was the one with all the answers. "Otherwise – like in your case – the power controls you."

Walter gave Harry a warning look.

Integra growled. "I am a Knight of the Convention of Twelve, Sir Potter-"

"So am I," Harry cut her off, raising his sabre up to emphasise his point, "so I know you don't need credentials for that."

"-and I was tasked with defending the Nation and the Anglican Church," Integra finished without paying Harry's interposition the slightest attention. She exhaled a cloud of grey and blue smoke.

And she was what – twenty now? She had what it took to be a commander, indubitably, but Harry suspected that she might have forgotten how to be human.

"It is time, Sir Hellsing," Walter reminded them.

Integra glanced at her watch and nodded. "Right. Sir Potter, I formally request that you depart from my house and do not enter it unless and until you are expressly invited-"

Her monologue was interrupted by five nearly simultaneous cracking sounds and a group of people appearing right in front of the double-winged door.

"Stand down!" Integra shouted before a single shot was fired, although the soldiers in the front lines all had their weapons in their hands and aimed at the intruders.

Hermione put her left hand on her hip, while in her right she held her wand, not-so-discreetly aimed at the obvious threat. "Thank you for supremely imprecise Apparition coordinates, Harry," she said dryly, tense and ready to shield or curse.

"Sorry, Hermione," Harry replied lightly, trying to somehow telepathically reassure her that they weren't going to be shot upon. "I didn't exactly have the opportunity to fixate."

She narrowed her eyes at him, but allowed: "In that case, that was a very good estimation."

"You are here, are you not?" Harry pointed out, moving so that he stood between the two potentially belligerent groups.

"We had to Line-of-sight-Apparate, mate," Ron complained. "You know I'm crap at that."

"You underestimate yourself," Hermione told him shortly, before she returned her attention to the private army facing her.

"Anyway," Harry quickly spoke up, wishing that Dumbledore were alive and this would be his task, "this is Sir Integra Hellsing, Knight of the Convention of Twelve and a self-proclaimed magic-hating bigot." His friends, who were familiar with the Dursleys, looked suddenly much less tentative, and much more glumly unfriendly, which was the effect Harry had been going for. Satisfied, he turned to Integra. "Mina, these are my friends and compatriots. They are _all_ magical." And yes, he was prodding the hornets' nest on purpose.

"You are being childish, Harry," Luna admonished him. She waved at the lined-up soldiers. "Hello! I'm Luna. It's nice to meet you."

The men were obviously quite confused about how they were supposed to react to that. The Sergeant in the front solved the dilemma by snapping off a short salute. The others followed his example.

Luna, comically, attempted to return the gesture. There were a few coughs here and there, coming from soldiers who didn't quite manage to hide their laughter at a petite blonde mucking up a salute.

"Alucard?" Harry asked.

Integra made a noncommittal gesture and blew out a lungful of smoke.

She was really asking for it, Harry decided. Stifling a grin, he lowered his voice and mused aloud: "He's sort of like Ginny." He nodded toward Ginny to identify her for Integra. "A spitfire, hungry for blood, bent on vengeance and prone to driving you insane with his quirks."

The young woman was momentarily struck speechless by Harry's gall. He had to bite his lip to prevent laughing his head off, but it was quite worth it to see the throbbing vein in Integra's forehead.

"Did you just compare Alucard to that feckless ornament of yours?!" she hissed.

Harry shrugged. "She's not feckless… she has some serious combat skill… just not the frame of mind to be constantly alert." And now to introduce the rest of his group (Hermione had done him a great service to bring all of them along). "Hermione does have it – she always did. Into Neville it was trained. Ron… to a point, but mostly he just decides to ignore his surroundings."

"Oi, mate!" Ron called out. "Are we leaving any time today? Mum's invited us all for lunch, and you know how I get when I'm hungry!"

Harry grinned. "Just a sec! Let me say goodbye!"

Ron grumbled something under his breath, which caused Hermione to lay into him. Neville tried to inch away, but Ginny kept a white-knuckled grip on his arm, so he didn't get very far.

"You left one out," Integra remarked.

"I don't pretend to have Luna figured out," Harry admitted easily. He still wasn't sure if Luna was a mad genius or a Seer or simply an entity that existed outside the laws of nature. "She looks like she doesn't notice anything, but when you eventually figure out what she's trying to tell you, it's like she's noticed everything."

"A clairvoyant?" Integra asked doubtfully, convinced that Harry was making these things up to intimidate her.

He was trying to intimidate her, of course – just as she was trying to intimidate him with the hall packed with soldiers – but he didn't need to make things up. The truth was scary enough. "Who knows? I just like to think of her as with one foot on the genius side of the line and the other on the insane side."

"That redhead of yours hardly notices anything but you," Alucard spoke, finally joining the conversation. Harry hadn't been worried that he would miss the vampire, but he felt something inside his chest unclench at Alucard's presence.

"Ginny?" he sighed. "Don't remind me… How do you tell a girl who can and is willing to hex you that you might've fallen out of love with her?"

"You don't," Alucard answered easily.

Harry batted off an overly friendly shadow-tentacle. Alucard took that as a challenge and sent two others in its place.

Harry bit down a giggle. "Then what do you do?"

"Suck it up?" Integra suggested wryly.

Harry blinked. It was ten seconds since Alucard had turned up, and already Harry had as good as forgotten that the woman was there.

"Discreetly dispose of her," Alucard suggested with a cross between a smile and a smirk. As if that had not been disconcerting enough, he licked his lips. The offer he implied was clear and understood, but Harry would never want to avoid Ginny so much that he would agree with her becoming the dinner of a vampire.

"The second is unfeasible," Harry hurriedly assured him and grabbed both grabby tentacles inside his fist, whereupon they promptly dispersed into nothing. "The first…" he looked over at Ginny, who was glaring at him and at Integra in turns, presumably jumping to conclusions and getting a completely wrong picture. "…is an idea."

"Give it time, Sir Harry," Walter bade him from Integra's other side. "At your age you have but a faint clue of what you are seeking in a life mate. Your friend might yet turn out to be exactly what you desire."

'She won't,' Alucard projected directly into Harry's head. 'No mortal ever will.'

Harry briefly closed his eyes and pressed his hand to his mouth to stifle a gasp. He had to believe that the vampire was simply provoking him, trying to condition him so that Harry's life would continue to be 'interesting,' full of mayhem and bloodshed and eventually leading Harry into such despair that he might reconsider becoming a Midian. Nevertheless, should Harry ever be so far gone that he might become inclined to jump ship, he would not be eligible anymore, for the most basic of reasons.

"It won't hurt to try," he said quietly, earning an approving nod from Walter and a silence from Alucard that somehow managed to convey that he was waiting for Harry to spot the fallacy in his statement – a fallacy about which Harry knew and which he didn't consider it to be a fallacy in the first place.

x

"Sergeant Major!" Integra barked, and mentally chastised herself.

This wasn't going according to her plan. Jonathan was supposed to have been unceremoniously escorted out the front gates, with the assumption that he would use his occult powers to transport himself to wherever he wished to go.

She should have known he was not going to cooperate as soon as she realised that he had not taken the opportunity to simply leave when he had been left alone in the dungeons, and instead chose to wait. He was waiting for _something_, obviously.

Integra once again cursed herself for not foreseeing this, and Walter for not advising her as he was supposed to, and Alucard for not warning her and enjoying her discomfort.

The situation was twice irritating, because Potter's orchestrating was artless. He was winging it, and it worked. The presence of his minions who, despite being faced with greatly superior numbers, were hardly fazed was a message in itself. Potter overacted by drawing a comparison between his blushing infatuated schoolgirl and the single most powerful blood-thirsty sadomasochistic undead beast in existence.

Interga clenched her fists when she realised that, to the boy, the comparison was valid: both the girl and the vampire were obviously expressing interest in him, and neither cared to keep the interest within any sane parameters of normalcy. However (indescribably, mind-bogglingly) different they were, they were both Potter's stalkers.

"Commander?" Hudson addressed her.

Integra glanced at him. "Have you briefed everyone?"

"Yes, Sir," the man replied. "We are at your command."

"Then go." She glared at the six people with alleged supernatural powers. "They are not a threat. The security will remain here, either way, and they can handle a handful of children."

Hudson put some meagre effort into not showing his misgivings, but he obeyed. The ranks started to file out.

"Remember when we first met?" Potter said.

Integra had been peripherally aware of him all the time, so it didn't surprise her to see him standing next to his followers rather than just a couple of steps away from her.

"Vaguely," she said truthfully. Too much had happened in the meantime. Jonathan was neither important nor interesting enough to keep him in mind.

The boy observed the orderly lines of soldiers. Then he shrugged. "I believed you simply because you sounded like you knew what you were talking about."

Integra's memory of the event was so foggy that she couldn't think of anything to say.

"I wanted to be your friend," Potter continued. "There's hardly anything I'd deny to my friend if it's in my power to provide…"

"And now you will not do it," Integra filled in, realising where he was going with the train of thought.

"No, I will not," Potter confirmed, and easily brushed off the requests for clarification coming from his following. "You wanted a competition, but then you started a fight – I still don't know why and if you explained it a thousand times, I'd probably never get it." He shrugged again. "Well, it is the only thing I can do, and I'd lie if I told you I was doing so happily, but I'll provide the antagonist you wished for."

Integra gripped the handle of her sabre and inclined her head in acknowledgement. "You have made your demonstration, Sir Potter. Further show of power is unnecessary."

"Is it?" he asked.

When their eyes met, Integra for the first time felt like she was standing face to face with a Knight. It was too late, however. The best she could do was confirm: "It is. The Hellsing Organisation will not involve itself in your matters unless the involvement is unavoidable-"

"In which case Her Majesty will know and approve," Walter filled in, to preemptively clear up any possible misunderstandings.

"Correct." Integra did not want to meet Harry Potter or any of his people again, but should it prove essential for the safety of the Nation and the Anglican Church, she would do it – the same way she was perfectly willing to unleash Alucard on those that crossed the line.

"Alright," Potter agreed easily.

"Now leave my house, and do not return unless expressly invited," Integra repeated. This time she was allowed to finish.

"Bye, then." Potter turned to the other teenagers. "Come on, people. It's rude to Disapparate inside." He led the way through the front door to the courtyard.

x

The sunlight was harsh and everywhere; at noon there were no shadows to hide in.

"Right," Neville muttered, rubbing his temple. "Please, can we leave this place soon?"

"It's creeping me out," Ginny professed, staring up at the hostile face of the building.

"Sir Harry James Potter, Knight of the Convention of Twelve," a deep voice said from every direction at the same time.

Harry's friends drew their wands and frantically tried to find its source. Harry smiled and took a step forward, separating himself from the group. Alucard wasn't projecting anything into his brain, and he had no idea what he was supposed to say. Goodbye? It's been nice to meet you?

Thank you for saving my life?

Harry did have a geas on Alucard, just like Integra, and realised that in theory that meant that, _just like Integra_, he was Alucard's Master, but it still shocked him to the core when Alucard stood in front of him in his human form and lowered himself onto one knee.

It felt wrong. If it was a mocking bow, Harry could have stomached it, even maybe laughed at himself for being pranked, but Alucard wasn't showing the slightest hint of being anything but sincere. It was _wrong_. This creature, this… No Life King, as Abraham had called him, had no business lowering himself onto his knees in front anybody, much less someone ordinary like Harry.

Harry was just a boy from the suburbs, one that had gone through some unusual experiences and gained some unwanted attention. He was not a Dark Lord. He was not a noble, not to speak about royalty.

Taking a deep breath, he leant in close to Alucard, rested his palms on the vampire's shoulders, and whispered directly into his ear: "It is not befitting of a Prince to kneel before a mere Knight, Your Highness." Then he straightened and waited for a reaction.

He wasn't sure what he expected.

Alucard remained kneeling, but he grinned up at Harry and, loudly, professed: "I like you."

I like you, too, Harry thought, smiling back. And that was an understatement. How could he not?

"You will be mine in the end, Sir Harry Potter," Alucard added.

Harry shook his head. "_We'll sssee, Your Highnessssss_…" he replied, slipping into Parseltongue.

Alucard read the thought and laughed.

Harry let him bask in the hilarity for a while, ignoring his friends' queries, and looked over his shoulder toward the Manor. "You won't let her become an android."

"And what do you mean by that?" the vampire demanded, as if he couldn't see it for himself inside Harry's head. He wanted Harry to say it out loud, but for whose benefit…?

"You won't let her sacrifice her individuality – her _soul_ – for the Mission," Harry said with the same certainty with which he knew that Alucard enjoyed being Mina's servant. "She will be strong, she will lead her forces, and she will celebrate victories and mourn losses, but in the end, she will still be more than just a Hellsing. She will be _Integra_."

Alucard stood, unbothered by the direct sunlight. His long, cold fingers cradled Harry's skull; he leant close, so close that Harry could smell the sweet scent of blood wafting from the vampire's mouth when he spoke: "How do ideas like this… get into a brain like yours?"

Not for the first time, Harry was tempted to close his eyes, relinquish all responsibility and surrender himself to the power and brutal simplicity that was Alucard. It was as alluring as the blithe weightlessness of the Imperius curse, with the added bonus of free will and breath-stealing sexual magnetism.

It was the bitter knowledge of just how much of everything was a lie, combined with the realisation of how little Harry's life meant in the greater scheme of things ever since the Prophecy had been fulfilled, that stopped him.

His body, struggling against the orders of his mind, expressed his true sentiments through stroking the tips of his fingers down the pale, smooth skin of Alucard's neck. "Even if you can't see all that's happening inside my head…" Harry said, hearing the regret in his own voice, "as you said, I never could be mysterious to you."

"Perhaps I erred," the vampire muttered, quietly, seductively.

"I doubt it," Harry replied. Alucard's sudden obviousness made him smile.

"It is not often that a mortal – or an immortal – surprises me. I believe I would enjoy meeting you again."

"Perhaps, one day." Harry's life was weird enough that it definitely was possible.

"Give me your promise, Harry Potter," Alucard demanded, forcefully turning Harry's head so that he was craning his neck and Alucard could look him in the eye.

"No," Harry refused.

"Give me your promise!"

"No."

"Give it!" Alucard insisted, gripping hard enough to leave bruises.

Harry laughed. Bruises? When Alucard could have squished Harry's skull like an overripe fig with one hand? "No, I won't," Harry maintained. "You won't harm me, Alucard."

"I will not let you go, either," Alucard threatened. "Rest assured that I can keep you in this place and attend to all my duties at the same time."

Harry believed that. On the other hand, it wasn't relevant to the discussion. "I would not doubt it. But then, how would you find satisfaction in meeting me again? We would never part."

"I would find different satisfaction in having you for myself," the vampire promised, and dragged a pointy tooth along the inside of Harry's wrist. "I could make you a permanent companion of mine – my fledgling. You are a virgin, I know that."

"It is tempting," Harry admitted, "except that I would starve myself rather than harm a human being. You can see that much in my head. I have battled Darkness for years and I would shorten my despair, were I to become a part of it."

Alucard must have looked, because a moment later he snarled. "I see. I have nothing to gain from keeping you here then."

Harry very quickly came to the revelation that he couldn't stand that expression on Alucard's face. As if he had wholly forgotten that he had been protesting so steadfastly just a minute ago, now he said: "I promise, if it is in my power, that I shall meet you again one day."

'You will see me again soon,' Alucard promised in return, and dispersed into a flock of bats.

Harry knew that was the truth. They did have a leash on each other, after all.

x

"Goodbye, Alucard," Potter said in the direction of the bats disappearing through the windows into the Manor.

"Harry!"

Integra watched as Potter's minions surrounded the boy, touching his arms and shoulders. She didn't have anything more to say to him, so it did not bother her in the least that a moment later all six of them disappeared.

On the contrary: she was glad they were gone.

"Have you enjoyed that, my Master?" Alucard's voice inquired.

Integra stood in the shadow of the doorway, a step before the line of the bright noon light.

"He is a peculiar young man, is he not?" She sighed. It hurt to admit. Somehow, caught up in the web of intrigue she had been spinning, Integra managed to forget what her first meeting with Harry Potter had been like. They had played a game and he had won it. She should have remembered. She should have capitalised on their mutual empathy, made him trust her and then observe him when he relaxed in her presence, rather than force him into a situation where he would have to show more of himself under pressure.

It had been a miscalculation on her part.

"Do you desire him, Integra?" Alucard taunted her. "Do you wish he had stayed here – that he bedded you, made you scream his name-"

"You are the one who wanted him to stay, Alucard," Integra fobbed him off almost calmly. The cigar had helped.

Who was she kidding? The absence of magic-users in her home helped.

"I needed to watch him for a while and asses him. Walter warned me that he was out of place here and the troops tried to mock me for his uselessness."

"And?" Alucard inquired.

Integra never took mocking and only ever accepted advice when her way of doing things had been subverted. Also, she only ever accepted advice from Walter, because since Richard's betrayal she trusted no one else.

There was Alucard but, as she reminded herself increasingly often lately, she could trust him only as far as she could throw him. That was a fairly long distance (even if it hadn't seemed so the past two days), but Alucard had always done his damnedest to stay separate of the shackles Abraham had put on him. He did not pretend to be tame, and his forced civility was just that: forced.

"How much power does he have over you?" she asked. He _had_ let her see the tête-à-tête with Potter for a reason.

"He could break the seals on me – if he could be persuaded," Alucard gleefully informed her.

Integra shuddered. They had been this close to perdition, and she had not even been aware. "Then it is a miracle that you are still my servant. He is weak; too weak for my fight."

x

"Are you alright, Harry?" Hermione demanded as soon as they appeared in the backyard of the Weasleys' house.

"I'm fine," Harry said. He was a little remorseful that he had spent the last week of his vacation away from his friends, but the visit had been important. He was armed with knowledge now – knowledge that might just help him save a lot of lives one day.

"But, that really looked like he was hurting you!" Ginny protested, brushing Harry's hair away from his face to see if there were any bruises.

Hermione wrung her hands. "When you were talking, we couldn't get to you. You didn't even hear us. There was some kind of barrier!"

"Did you hear us?" Harry inquired, resigning himself to Ginny, who was hanging onto his neck and squeezing harder than Alucard had.

"No," Ron told him. "But I think the Hellsing girl did."

"Who was that, Harry? _What_ was that?" Hermione asked.

"He…" Harry didn't know what to say. He sure as Hell wasn't going to tell anyone anything about Alucard's history, and he wasn't about to make the Hellsing Organisation public knowledge, so he had to first sort out what he was going to say to whom, and what he was going to ask them to keep private. There was only one thing he felt he could disclose right now. "His name is Alucard."

"H-harry… T-that was a vampire…" Neville pointed out. He was pale, now that Harry took the time to look at him. His hands were shaking.

"I know." Harry found himself subjected to five looks that were asking if he had hit his head lately. "I like him. He makes me feel safe." The looks intensified, and there were some slack jaws added, too. "And yes, I do realise that casts doubts on my sanity."

"Only a little," Hermione quipped, trying hard to be supportive. "I'll ascribe it to PTSD."

"Are you sure he didn't do anything to you?" Ginny repeated in a plaintive voice, and sniffled into Harry's transfigured shirt.

"He saved my life," Harry announced. With this group, he didn't need to explain what kind of bond the action had forged.

"And why, exactly, did your life need to be saved, Harry?" Hermione demanded.

Harry blinked and looked over his friends' heads to the stooping structure on the Burrow. "That's… a long story. And Mrs Weasley is never going to hear it, alright?"

x

Alone in his underground throne chamber, with not a soul in the world listening, the one that was named Alucard laughed. At first it was but a chuckle, but the chuckle grew into a deep-throated laughter and then into hysterical howling that unsettled the bats in the orchard and sent them fluttering over the Manor into the interminable Darkness.

There was no Full Moon in the sky, no slaughter and the only available blood was packaged, but it was a beautiful night nonetheless.

Feeling that he had laughed enough, the one that was named Alucard fell silent, for a few moments, before he raised his head, peered through the fall of white hair and grinned, saying to himself for the simple pleasure of hearing his own voice echo off of the walls: "In that, you are quite mistaken, Master."


	8. Teaser

A/N: Thank you for your support! There is a possibility of a sequel, I admit. I've got a rough plot and a few scenes written, but I doubt that I'll ever get around to writing it (there would be slash; also, it would explain why Alucard _could_ turn Harry despite him not meeting the requirements). I'm waiting to see how the rest of the OVAs will go, but don't hold your breath.

Since there's one major plot issue that's remained open, I have decided to post this. It's a spoiler for the sequel, but go ahead and read. Warning for a 'slashy vibe' (as coined by a reviewer), although there is no actual slash present.

x

Epilogue/Teaser

x

"Does Integra know what you're doing?" Harry asked, baffled by the amount of time Alucard dared stay away from the Hellsing Manor.

"Integra is dead," Alucard informed him.

"Dead…" Harry repeated, trying to remember what it was like to care about such things as someone being dead. Still, there had to be an heir, right? The Hellsing Organisation could not just stop existing. "Children?"

"She had none."

"Then the Hellsings are-"

"No more," Alucard filled in. Then he smirked and leaned forward, deep into Harry's personal space. "However, there are Potters yet – and your geas is as intact as ever, Harry, even if you personally cannot control it anymore. You have children-"

"Leave my kids alone," Harry hissed in a low tone that would have frightened any hardened criminal, but Alucard didn't seem to have noticed.

"The eldest is out of question," Alucard continued, alluding to the fact that James had married just out of school, like both his grandfathers. "The youngest also, but the middle one… the _white_ one…"

"Albus," Harry whispered. He hated himself for knowing that Alucard was right. Someone had to do it; there had to be a family that understood duty, accepted the life full of pain and violence that would come with it – a family of strong men and women who wouldn't choose the easy before the right and who would always see to it that Alucard's leash had not become too loose.

It was anyone's guess whether Alucard had, back in 1999, chosen Harry to be Integra's successor, if he had somehow suspected it would be necessary, or if it had been a mere precaution… Maybe even what Alucard had told him then was the closest to the truth, and this situation was a lucky (for the world) coincidence. The only one who knew was Alucard, and if he ever chose to answer a question pertaining to his motivation, he was liable to lie. Harry accepted that he would never find out.

It hurt him that he had essentially damned his descendants to the kind of brutal existence Integra had led; even harsher and more demanding than Harry's own; however, it couldn't be changed, and the most Harry could do was stick around and aid them in any way possible.

Besides, Alucard was staying whether he wanted to or not (though he _did_ want – that was one of the very few things about Alucard that Harry didn't doubt), and Alucard wouldn't let Harry leave before he got thoroughly sick of him.


End file.
